This page will help you get started using Facsimile which is designed as a flow cytometry teaching aid.
Practical Considerations:
Facsimile
is a
JAVA
application. It has been tested on, and operates as expected on
Linux
, MS Windows NT,
Macintosh OS X
. Other systems which support JAVA
should also work fine.
The program, by default runs in a local mode, but it can also be set to run
"remote" by using a -r option. When starting, specify URL to a server
containing the
appropriate directory structure, help and data files
. For organisations which want to support standard set of files to be used as
a resource this option is convenient. The approach being that all users from
different computers can access a standard set of data files controlled by the
server administrator.
This program is designed to with a main data display window and a data file
selection window. The data files that appear for selection can be changed by
editing the "index.dat" file in the data directory, and this file should be
edited to add files of interest. A simple way to do this is to delete the index.dat file,
to copy files of interest into the data directory then from a shell list the files in the data directory and pipe them into an index.dat, thus
ls /facsimile/data | index.dat.
The help file is also standard html format and can be modified to suit a
particular organisations needs. To do this, edit the "help.map" file in the
help sub directory to the main facsimile directory.
The source code:
The source for Facsimile is available under GPL license from our CVS server . We STRONGLY ENCOURAGE PROGRAMMERS TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS PROJECT.
Theoretical Background:
Flow cytometry core facilities in institutes which have some teaching responsibilities are faced with unique problems when it comes to educating new users. These problems are characterised by a lack of available instrumentation time to become familiar with the technology, lack of "action and affect" scenerios, limited sample volumes to learn instrument set-up, and the expense involved in preparing samples for purely teaching purposes. In an attempt to address these issues, we have undertaken to develop a virtual flow cytometer.
The concept of compensation of data has often proven to be a stumbling block for people new to flow cytometry, so one of the main goals was to enable compensation of data as events appear on the displays. This software allows compensation of data and viewing of the compensation matrix which is generated.
This page was last updated by G.W.Osborne on the 20th Feb. 2002