[From automation to robotics].
The introduction of automation into the laboratory of biology seems to be unavoidable. But at which cost, if it is necessary to purchase a new machine for every new application? Fortunately the same image processing techniques, belonging to a theoretic framework called Mathematical Morphology, may be used in visual inspection tasks, both in car industry and in the biology lab. Since the market for industrial robotics applications is much higher than the market of biomedical applications, the price of image processing devices drops, and becomes sometimes less than the price of a complete microscope equipment. The power of the image processing methods of Mathematical Morphology will be illustrated by various examples, as automatic silver grain counting in autoradiography, determination of HLA genotype, electrophoretic gels analysis, automatic screening of cervical smears... Thus several heterogeneous applications may share the same image processing device, provided there is a separate and devoted work station for each of them.
D001331:Automation / Q000191:economics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male
De l'automatisation à la robotique.