UCLA Develops World's Fastest Camera To Hunt Down Cancer In Real Time

MrSeb writes "Engineers at UCLA, led by Bahram Jalali and Dino Di Carlo, have developed a camera that can take 36.7 million frames per second, with a shutter speed of 27 picoseconds. By far the fastest and most sensitive camera in the world — it is some 100 times faster than existing optical microscopes, and it has a false-positive rate of just one in a million — it is hoped, among other applications, that the device will massively improve our ability to diagnose early-stage and pre-metastatic cancer. This camera can photograph single cells as they flow through a microfluidic system at four meters per second (9 mph — about 100,000 particles per second), with comparable image quality to a still CCD camera (with a max shooting speed of around 60 fps). Existing optical microscopes use CMOS sensors, but they're not fast enough to image more than 1,000 particles per second. With training, the brains of the operation — an FPGA image processor — can automatically analyze 100,000 particles per second and detect rare particles (such as cancer cells) 75% of the time."

Comments

Oh just wait

[kiriath]

Wait until Mythbusters has their hands on one of THESE. An entire show comprised of one bullet hitting a target? Much Win.

Re:Oh just wait

[durrr]

At 24fps playback, light itself would move only 192 meters per second. A pistol bullet would move at less than 1 mm a second resulting in a pretty much still-footage look.

Blinking the lights of a football stadium would look nice though.

100 times faster than existing optical microscopes

[vlm]

100 times faster than existing optical microscopes

What does that mean before it went thru the journalist filter?

I haven't done film photography in twenty years, but I still thought of "fast lenses" like those weirdo F/0.3 "lenses" made outta mirrors and pretty much anything lower than F/1. You know, the lenses that cost about as much as a cheap new car. Yeah, a 35 picosecond shutter speed means you need a pretty fast lens to feed enough photons thru it, but what does that factor of 100 actually mean, like F/0.001 lens exists or something?

Re:100 times faster than existing optical microsco

[durrr]

Don't think of lenses at all, this is a specialist setup made to picture cells and is more something along the line of the bastard child of a flow cytometer and a picosecond laser system than anything resembling classical photography equipment.

Re:100 times faster than existing optical microsco

[vlm]

The lens and F stop have nothing to do with speed, the shutter does.

Nah there are fast lenses and slow lenses. At least that's what they called them in the 90s. A fast lens can run a faster shutter speed usually because its bigger but also "insert optical magic here".

Just like you can have two telescopes with identical focus and identical field of view but the one with twice the lens surface area has a shutter speed twice as fast, because it shovels in twice as many photons per second.

Think how easy it is to make a zoom lens for sunlit outdoor work, but how hard it is to pull off a long distance candle-lit shot... you can do it with a fast lens that basically resembles a large aperture telescope, or theres some heavy optical weirdness with trading off the depth of field for light strength or something.

I know just enough optics to be really dangerous. Mostly because I know microwave RF optics better than I know visual optics.

Here I found the lens speed article on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed

Re:100 times faster than existing optical microsco

[tlhIngan]

I can tell. The lens and F stop have nothing to do with speed, the shutter does. Of course with fast shutter speed you need fast film (is there still any around?) and a larger aperture (F-stop).

The lens has nothing to do with a camera's speed.

And you're speaking nonsense.

First, there are three variables at play when taking a photo. The shutter speed, the aperture size (usually expressed as a fraction of focal length, f), and the "film" speed (sensitivity).

A properly exposed photo (usually desired in most cases excepting artistic composition) is where sufficient photons hit the light-sensitive medium to generate a usable image. With 3 variables to play with, there is a whole range of settings that will generate an image.

Hence the concepts of stuff like "stops" - where you can halve the shutter speed (1/30th from 1/60th, say), but also close down the aperture (by half) and still end up with a good exposure. Or decrease the media's sensitivity.

What you use depends on the situation and artistic effects you want to put on it - larger apertures reduce depth of field, faster shutters "freeze" fast motion, more sensitive recording media generally are noisier/grainier, etc.

A "fast" lens is called that because it has a very wide aperture that can let in lots of light, meaning you can get very nicely exposed photos at very high shutter speeds, thus capturing faster motion. A "slow" lens means the aperture is smaller and thus requires a longer exposure time (slower shutter speed).

Remember, it's all about getting the proper exposure, and playing with the three variables will generate many configurations of apeture/shutter/sensitivity that will work. The one you use depends on the situation.