Custom cameras for science and industry

Over the last decade or so, the digital camera has revolutionised the way we use photography and video recording. In the early part of the last century, photography was the preserve of the wealthy and the technically adept, but today, electronic imaging array technology and cheap digital storage have dramatically simplified and reduced the cost to the point where the majority of consumers now have the budget and skills to participate.Conventional digital cameras are designed to take 'still' photographs where the image information is simply the colour and the brightness of the light at each pixel. Even video recordings are just a series of still pictures viewed in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. To put this into engineering terms, normal digital cameras record a 'd.c.' image. However, in many sophisticated medical and industrial imaging techniques, the image is not 'still' - it fluctuates in brightness and colour. Here, it is the fluctuations (the a.c.) that contain the interesting part of the picture, rather than the d.c. and a conventional (d.c.) camera is of no use. At the moment these sophisticated types of imaging system must use just a single detector which is connected to extra circuitry that can measures the a.c. component. Of course one pixel is not a picture, so the object must be mechanically raster scanned and a two-dimension image is slowly built up by making many individual measurements and then arranging them into a picture. This results in a very slow, complicated and expensive instrument, much like photography was one or two generations ago.This is a serious problem in medicine and industry. Techniques that could discover new drugs, diagnose illness or improve manufacturing processes are confined to the laboratory as they are just too slow, expensive and complicated to use in the clinic or on the production line. However, EPSRC funded work we have carried out over several years has allowed us to design and build a range of cameras that can replace all the slow, bulky scanning equipment so that two-dimensional a.c. imaging can be performed in much the same way as d.c. imaging is now. In addition, now we have begun to publicise our work, a diverse range of new and important applications for our cameras are emerging and it is becoming obvious that the cameras could have a large impact on many imaging problems faced by scientific researchers, health workers and manufacturers.The work we propose in this project will allow us to show the market what our cameras can do. We wish to demonstrate that we can revolutionise many sophisticated imaging techniques in the same way that the digital camera has transformed photography. We will turn our laboratory prototypes into 'plug and play' camera systems that we can send to the many people who are requesting our cameras, and support them as they install and use them. In particular, we will work very closely with a UK company that specialises in manufacturing and retailing high performance camera technology, and a cardiac physiology research group from Oxford University that is extending the use of our cameras into areas that are new and important, both from a commercial and a scientific point of view. The result of this work will be increased market awareness of our products, and a much better understanding of the market place for us. This knowledge and publicity is vital so we can develop a market and an appropriate strategy for commercialising the cameras.

The technology we have developed differs from conventional camera technology in that it allows one to detect very small signal variations on a large constant background. This leads to a large number of potential scientific and industrial applications which can benefit from our technology and this Follow-on Fund project concerns its commercialisation. Thus, beneficiaries can be classified into three groups: * commercial camera and system manufacturers and distributors; * end-users across a broad range of applications; * the general public. We plan to commercialise our camera technology by forming a spin-out company to design and manufacture camera chips for subsequent integration by camera and system manufacturers and onward sale. These companies will benefit by having new product lines which have clear advantages over currently available technology. We have already discussed our technology with three significantly different companies, all of whom have expressed continuing interest and could be accommodated within our proposed spin-out model. The first two companies, including project partner Cairn Research Ltd, are likely to be the first commercial beneficiaries of our technology if planned evaluations meet their requirements and they could reasonably have new products available within 2-3 years. The final company is in regular contact with us but has particular requirements which we will meet in the longer term as we develop new processes. Further camera and system manufacturers will be engaged to exploit of our camera technology for different applications and plan that the first products will become available within 3 years. More advanced systems, which will incorporate future generations of our technology, are likely to have product launches in a 7-10 year timeframe. The obvious group of beneficiaries are end-users who will use our technology for a broad range of applications, for example in materials characterisation, biological imaging and bio-sensing. Though end-users are likely to be confined mainly to industrial and academic research groups in the first instance this will expand significantly as new products are launched e.g. for drug discovery, clinical diagnosis and manufacturing processes. In the first instance it is expected that end-users will use cameras incorporating our technology to upgrade existing systems which currently take single point measurements and build up images point-by-point through scanning. This will reduce system complexity (and for newly constructed systems cost) and allow a whole image to be recorded in the same time that it currently takes a single point measurement. Other applications which benefit from particular features of our technology have also been identified. For example, in neural cell imaging we have used our technology to track cells as they slowly migrate around a culture dish, successfully imaging these low contrast images with action potentials of less than 1ms. Another application is multimodal imaging of cardiac cells with unprecedented resolution and removing the need for careful alignment of multiple cameras and image correlation. The first beneficiaries of our technology will be the end-users who will evaluate it as part of this project, most of whom will upgrade single point systems to take faster measurements and/or measurements not previously possible. These are mainly UK research groups who will receive the kudos of being first to publish new and exciting research results. Other research groups - both in industry and academia - will have access to our technology as commercial products become available. The most widespread beneficiaries of our technology are the general public who will benefit from the research and development activities undertaken by end-users especially in areas of healthcare, which will lead to better patient care, and improved manufacturing technology, which generate considerable economic benefits.