New Camera Records Million Frames Per Second

High-speed cameras, used in Hollywood to create breathtaking, special effects, are nothing compared with the ones used in laboratories for imaging rapid interactions between things so small that thousands of them would fit within the width of a human hair. But the number-one prize goes to the Megaframe project, which has recently devised the world's first million-frame-per-second, 1024-pixel, photon-resolution video camera. The instrument opens up new research possibilities in the fields of medicine and biology, as experts will be able to observe fast interactions at the small scale live, PhysOrg reports.

In addition to implementing a host of new technologies in a single device, the Megaframe project has also pushed the CMOS technology – the sensors used to capture light bouncing off objects – to its boundaries, in terms of sophistication and miniaturization. The coordinator of the EU-funded Megaframe project, Edoardo Charbon, says that, “We need this sort of detail because biomedical scientists are studying processes at the intra-cellular and molecular levels.”

Because the new, ultra-high-speed camera can detect a single photon about one million times per second, it can significantly push back the boundaries that limit medical investigations today, which are made futile by the fact that researchers cannot observe what goes on inside cells and other structures in great detail. With the Megaframe camera, they will be able to do so, and then slow down the footage to a speed where they can understand precisely how things function at the nano- or micro-scale.

Charbon adds that, with the new cameras, “It is possible, for example, to go inside neurons and look at their ion channels. These are the channels that allow neurons to communicate with other neurons. And you can basically see the amount of calcium that is present. You can probe optically how neurons communicate with other neurons just by looking at the concentrations of calcium in real time. Biomedical scientists could in principle use this microscopic information about calcium to learn about macroscopic conditions like Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s or epilepsy.”

“Our preliminary tests were conducted in an animal MRI, which in general has much higher fields than a human MRI. Human MRI tests will follow. Thus, it can be envisaged to have a system where fluorescence-enhanced imaging and functional MRI may be used simultaneously. This is very useful in a number of biomedical applications, where one wants to monitor the correlation between the presence of certain molecules in organs, such as the brain, and their function,” the scientist concludes.