UCLA Develops World's Fastest Camera To Hunt Down Cancer In Real Time 51
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."
Re:Oh just wait (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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?