For data acquisition, a Gtkmm application (casBasicAcquisition) was designed and implemented to provide an environment for creating and starting experiments. Using this application, a user creates a new experiment with the desired acquisition parameters. The actual acquisition of the experiment data (generally over a period of days) is managed by the acquistion daemon (casBasicAcquisitionDaemon).

The basic acquisition scheme allows for flexibility in setting up new experiments. Each experiment has the format of having a set of general parameters that describe the entire experiment, a set of parameters describing each sample in the experiment, and a set of parameters related to each sequence of images acquired at each microscope field. Each sample can contain an arbitrary number of sequences and sequences are not shared among samples.
In general, each sample is a collection of microscope fields. In practice, a sample is generally all of the microscope fields acquired in a given well of a multi-well plate, although, this is not strictly enforced by the software.

Some examples of the different types of parameters for each part of the experiment:
Experiment Parameters:
* Experiment ID
* Description
* Desired duration
* Type of sample container ( T-25 Flash, 12 Well Plate, etc...)
* Number of samples

Sample Parameters:
* Description
* Cell Line
* Number of sequences

Sequence Parameters:
* Exposure
* Gain
* Filter/Shutter setup (controls bright field vs. fluorescent acquisition)
* Image interleave
* Use autofocus

In general, experiments can range in size from a few hundred megabytes to tens of gigabytes. In order to preserve as much detail as possible, image data is compressed using lossless zlib compression in a custom designed file format. Currently, the total LSDCAS data repository is approximately one terabyte in size. Over the coming years, the rate of data acquisition is expected to increase so that we may double this sometime in early 2008.

In order to provide collaborating investigators with reasonably efficent access to their expeirment data, we also provided MPEG-2 compressed copies of the image data. These MPEG clips are extremely useful in certain types of analysis as well as for presentations.