The PRISM™ BIO-BOX is a small animal in vivo optical imaging system built for cohort throughput without a core facility budget. Its 25 x 25 cm field of view holds ten mice in a single acquisition, so a full cohort shares one luciferin window, one anesthesia depth and one set of detector conditions, halving sessions and animal handling against five mouse systems. Detection is by a 9 megapixel back-illuminated Sony stacked CMOS sensor, 3000 x 3000 pixels at 3.76 µm, cooled to a dark current below 0.001 e- per pixel per second, supporting exposures beyond 60 minutes while still resolving individual organs on every animal, with zoom to a 4 cm field for 13.3 µm per pixel sampling. Sensitivity is measured rather than quoted from a datasheet, verified against a NIST traceable low flux source that ships with the system so your team can requalify it at any time. Multichannel fluorescence spans the visible to the near infrared, with motorized filter wheels putting 24 excitation and emission combinations online, expandable to 360, each channel acquired on its own filter pair with no computational unmixing. The system ships fully integrated with the Kent Scientific SomnoFlo low flow vaporizer, which runs on ambient air, so there is no compressed gas cylinder in the imaging suite and two people can move the complete imaging and anesthesia workflow between laboratories as one system. Options extend the platform to SWIR and NIR-II imaging from 900 to 1700 nm, 3D trans-fluorescence with depth reconstruction and a BSL3 isolation chamber for ten mice, and the PRISM platform has been cited in more than 40 peer reviewed publications.
PYRAMID Software Suite
Acquisition and PYRAMID analysis software are included with unlimited licenses, designed to help you visualize, explore, and analyze your experimental data with ease. It has been optimized to work with data from the PRISM imaging platform, including bioluminescence, fluorescence and SWIR modalities. Pyramid lets you load multiple images, draw and adjust regions of interest (ROIs), and instantly see key statistics.
Applications
The PRISM BIO-BOX is a bioluminescence imaging system built for the clean detection of low-light signals across a range of preclinical and in vitro work. It is well suited to imaging autoluminescent bacteria in microbiology studies, monitoring tumor development in mice, exploring light emitting pathways in plants, performing cell culture imaging, and serving as a flexible alternative to traditional plate readers for luminescence based assays. Because the system pairs high photon detection with a low background, it supports researchers working with weak bioluminescent signals in both live animal and in vitro models.
Resolution is not sacrificed for sensitivity. The cooled CMOS sensor delivers a 9 MP sensor (3000 x 3000 array) so that faint sources are rendered as sharp, well localized spots rather than soft blooms. Cooling holds the dark background low through the long exposures that low-light imaging requires. A variable stage adjusts the field of view from 4 cm for single mouse imaging up to 25 cm for imaging 10 mouse BLI, so the same system scales from single subject studies to higher throughput cohorts.
SomnoFlo Anesthesia
All PRISM in vivo imaging systems come standard with an integrated Kent Scientific SomnoFlo anesthesia system. Unlike conventional setups, SomnoFlo requires no oxygen concentrator, oxygen tank, or house gas line; it draws and delivers ambient air directly, eliminating the need for a separate compressed gas supply chain. The advantage of working with SomnoFlo is simplicity and independence: your imaging suite doesn’t need to be built around gas infrastructure, permitting, or tank management, there’s no O2 supply to monitor, refill, or service, and there’s no risk of an imaging session being interrupted by a depleted tank or concentrator downtime, so labs and facilities without existing oxygen infrastructure get a fully self-contained, plug-and-play imaging and anesthesia workflow from day one.
In in vivo bioluminescence imaging, what decides whether you see your signal is not raw sensitivity but contrast, the ratio of the signal to the background it sits against, and a detector that collects a large photon flux gives no advantage if it generates a large background to match. Real luciferase tumors seen in publications are well above the autoluminescent noise background of 1000 photons/s/cm²/sr, so what matters is a quiet floor.
