UK researchers develop single photon camera that can 'see' through the body
Researchers at the UK Universities of Edinburgh, Bath, and Heriot-Watt have completed the first steps in developing a single photon camera that can "˜see' through the human body. They described their work in a recent paper in Biomedical Optics Express.
The camera has been developed as part of the Proteus project, which has £11.3M investment from the EPSRC and £3M from the three consortium Universities.
Proteus aims to revolutionise how lung diseases are diagnosed and managed within Intensive Care, by rapid and accurate diagnosis of bacterial infection. By injecting a fluid containing biological 'Smartprobes' directly into the alveoli of the lungs via a microendoscopic fibre bundle, the long term aim is to selectively tag bacterial membranes and make them fluoresce, thus making them observable.
Providing a real-time view of what pathogens are present and the physiological processes occurring will not only make diagnoses quicker, but will consequently help clinicians to better manage antibiotic use "“ something which is a growing global concern as antibiotic resistance increases.
Single photon detection gives the camera a high sensitivity towards observing the small number of photons passing through tissue, but it also records the time they take to arrive onto the sensor. Light which is highly scattered travels a longer distance and therefore takes more time to reach the camera.
The system is compact (a tripod mounted camera and a laser pulsed source) and can be applied within an environment with fluorescent room lights on (as in a clinical setting). The team thinks that the simplicity of this approach will enable ballistic photon localisation to move out of the lab and into the clinic, permitting precise localisation / navigation in real-time, using inexpensive and compact equipment.
The team is led by Robert R. Thomson and Mike Tanner (Heriot Watt University). Thomson said: "Single-photon imaging technologies exhibit massive potential, and are an area where the UK leads the world. Proteus has uniquely brought together a multidisciplinary group of world-leading engineers, physicists and clinicians, to develop this potentially game-changing approach to medical imaging."
'Ballistic and snake photon imaging for locating optical endomicroscopy fibres' by M. G. Tanner, T. R. Choudhary, T. H. Craven, B. Mills, M. Bradley, R. K. Henderson, K. Dhaliwal, and R. R. Thomson; Biomedical Optics Express, Vol. 8, Issue 9, pp.4077-4095 (2017)
