LIC – Infrastructure

In response to both users’ and customers’ demands, LIC has developed an internal Quality Management to ensure high quality of facility infrastructure and services. One of the main objectives of this quality management is the consistent enhancement of facility overall performance to provide always access to state of the art technology in the field of life science.
A quality assurance system for the technical equipment in the LIC was established stepwise over the last years. We also collect all input from our users about quality control, new techniques, hardware, and software in a database and discuss this in our weekly LIC staff meetings and as well as in budget planning rounds with local funders from the University and the Faculties.

The following tests and maintenance work as well as supporting measures are carried out on regular basis (see further information: quality management manual ).

Daily:

• Visual inspection and necessary cleaning of all important parts and accessories of the microscope set-ups (objectives, motorized tables, sample holders, table inserts, immersion fluids and applicators, completeness of cleaning equipment for objectives, microscope incubators, check aqua stop)
• Cell culture room: Check water bathes and incubators
• Temperature of incubators, deep freezers, freezers and refrigerators are permanently monitored and alarm is sent out by mobile phone in case of error

Weekly:

• Check the storage capacity of the local hard drives including the OS hard drive
• Remove all temporary files
• Backup of the OS hard drive
• Check, if objective protection works properly
• Inspection of the objectives under a stereo-microscope, Control images are taken under the stereo microscope from each front lens to monitor damages like scratches, Cleaning with a special lens cleaning fluid from Zeiss under permanent rotation of the lens to prevent drying of dirt on the front lens surface
• Ponit-Spread-Function (PSF) measurement, if lens has new scratches or other problems

Monthly:

• Delete expired local user accounts
• Check the pinhole and collimator alignment with a test sample for UV, VIS and 2-photon using a standard test procedure. We have a system set-up, which automatically resets the correct pinhole settings after each session, so that any misalignment done by a user will be corrected the next time the confocal software is restarted. So this assures that only the LIC staff can change pinhole and collimator settings after performing an exact calibration procedure.
• Confocal scanner calibration with a special software tool to keep the imaging performance high
• Shading problems are evaluated with color slides from Chroma
• Laser out-put power is documented for all laser lines with a special power-meter directly mounted on the microscope table
• Out-put power of the fluorescence illumination on widefield microscopes is documented with a special power-meter directly mounted on the microscope table

Quality control

(covering monitoring of user satisfaction and project success in terms of published results):

• We run a trouble-ticket system, where our users can, with a click on an icon on the desktop, give us directly input including screenshots or attach files.
• We have run a user satisfaction survey using SurveyMonkey up to now only once in 2010, but will repeat this every half year in the future.
• We try to follow up the success of projects by actively writing to all project leaders once per year to send us the PDF of the papers, they published with images/results enabled by the LIC infrastructure. However, these kind of requests have usually only a relative poor feedback rate of 50%, so we will soon start with a special kind of bonus systems for users, who acknowledge the work of the LIC in their papers. We have included this in our Usage Conditions and Rules for the LIC

for further question send E-mail to : lic@imaging.uni-freiburg.de