Biomedical Applications of Stereoscopy for Three-Dimensional Surface Reconstruction in Scanning Electron Microscopes

The scanning electron microscope (SEM) offers two-dimensional (2D) micrographs of three-dimensional (3D) objects due to its inherent operating mechanisms. To overcome this limitation, other devices have been used for quantitative morphological analysis. Many efforts have been made on the applications of software-based approaches to 3D reconstruction and measurements by SEM. Based on the acquisition of two stereo images, a multi-view technique consists of two parts: (i) geometric calibration and (ii) image matching. Quantitative morphological parameters such as height and depth could be nondestructively measured by SEM combined with special software programs. It is also possible to obtain conventional surface parameters such as roughness and volume of biomedical specimens through 3D SEM surface reconstruction. There is growing evidence that conventional 2D SEM without special electron detectors can be transformed to 3D SEM for quantitative measurements in biomedical research.