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.

To begin with, this “automated flow-through single-particle optical microscope” (that’s its official name) is nothing like a digital camera. With a shooting speed of 36.7 million fps and a shutter speed of 27 picoseconds, CCD and CMOS sensors simply aren’t up to the task; it takes too long to read the data out of each pixel, and at such high speeds there isn’t enough light to produce a sharp image anyway. Instead, this new microscope uses STEAM imaging — serial time-encoded amplified microscopy — which was developed by the same UCLA team in 2009. Without getting into really gritty details: Basically, STEAM fires off quick laser pulses which are reflected off cells that flow through a microfluidic device. The image is amplified and picked up by a very high-speed single-pixel photodetector, and then the image is processed by an FPGA. There’s a (silent) video at the end of the story that demonstrates how the STEAM system works.

The end result is a camera that can photograph single cells as they flow through the system at four meters per second (9 mph!), with comparable image quality to a still CCD camera (i.e. a CCD camera pointed down at a static slide). In the image below, the middle column shows the current state-of-the-art CMOS optical microscopes, while the right hand side shows the new STEAM-based system from UCLA. Just so you understand the significance of this: With a flow rate of 4m/s, UCLA’s microscope automatically images 100,000 particles per second, at a quality comparable to a camera that can only shoot around 60 frames per second. With training, the FPGA can automatically detect rare particles (such as cancer cells) 75% of the time.

To be frank, this is one of the coolest mashups of bleeding-edge technologies that I’ve ever seen: Picosecond lasers, microfluidics, and FPGAs, all working in perfect harmony. Furthermore, the STEAM system is easily capable of imaging 200,000 particles per second — when we can engineer a microfluidic device that can withstand twice the pressure. When it comes to battling cancer, this might be one of the biggest breakthroughs ever — but it is also big news for any scientist, engineer, or doctor who studies microbes, fuels, foods, and pharmaceuticals. Optical microscopy is used in almost every sphere of science, and UCLA’s microscope is an excitingly big breakthrough.

Read more at UCLA, or the research paper 10.1073/pnas.1204718109 at PNAS