Biomedical imaging at one-thousandth the cost

MIT researchers have developed 

a new biomedical imaging system 

that harnesses an off-the-shelf 

depth sensor such as Microsoft’s 

Kinect.

MIT News Office  – Nov. 23, 2015 – researchers have developed a biomedical imaging system that could ultimately replace a $100,000 piece of a lab equipment with components that cost just hundreds of dollars.

The system uses a technique called fluorescence lifetime imaging, which has applications in DNA sequencing and cancer diagnosis, among other things. So the new work could have implications for both biological research and clinical practice. The MIT researchers reported the new work in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Optica.

Fluorescence lifetime imaging, as its name implies, depends on fluorescence, or the tendency of materials known as fluorophores to absorb light and then re-emit it a short time later. For a given fluorophore, interactions with other chemicals will shorten the interval between the absorption and emission of light in a predictable way. Measuring that interval – the “lifetime” of the fluorescence – in a biological sample treated with a fluorescent dye can reveal information about the sample’s chemical composition.

The Media Lab researchers, however, extract additional information from the light signal by subjecting it to a Fourier transform. The Fourier transform is a technique for breaking signals — optical, electrical, or acoustical — into their constituent frequencies. A given signal, no matter how irregular, can be represented as the weighted sum of signals at many different frequencies, each of them perfectly regular.

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Source: MIT press release