US researchers are using what is being billed as one of the world’s fastest cameras to identify and isolate circulating tumour cells in a blood sample.
The new system boasts a throughput of 100,000 cells per second with a false-positive rate of one cell in a million.
It could be used in the early diagnosis of cancer and for monitoring the effectiveness of drug and radiation therapy. Alternatively, it could pick out unique stem cells used for regenerative medicine.
‘To catch these elusive cells, the camera must be able to capture and digitally process millions of images continuously at a very high frame rate,’ said Bahram Jalali at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. ‘Conventional CCD and CMOS cameras are not fast and sensitive enough. It takes time to read the data from the array of pixels, and they become less sensitive to light at high speed.’
Currently, flow cytometry is the only high-throughput method for sorting cells, but since it relies on single-point light scattering, as opposed to taking a picture, it is not sensitive enough to detect very rare cell types, such as those present in early-stage or pre-metastasis cancer patients.
For a number of years, the UCLA team has been refining its serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) camera, which can now take 36.7 million frames every second at a shutter speed of 27 picoseconds.
In its latest work, the team integrated this camera with advanced microfluidics and real-time image processing in order to classify cells in blood samples.
‘This technology can significantly reduce errors and costs in medical diagnosis,’ said lead author Keisuke Goda, a UCLA programme manager in electrical engineering and bioengineering.
Exciting but hopefully its not priced like the currant options owned by Johnston & Johnston, sadly so much has yet to be learned about the full potential of ctc’s yet due to the typical insanely high profit margins within medical industries few researchers never mind patients actually have access to these technologies so as they can enable fast refinement of what could be something really special.
“Unmonitored Patients”
It sounds too shocking to be true but currently most patients are dished out treatments with little more than blind hope of finding the right drug combination, Even in the rare event when a patient has access to the best of medical imaging this is only sensitive to a mass’s of 2mm sq or more –a tumour around 2mm sq can easily have a population of 2,500,000 metastatic cells” if you do the math on a 1cm spherical mass that has enlarger by 1mm you may understand the shocking truth.
Ctc’s offer hope as opposed to bio markers that you read about in the papers are usually so non-specific (Of little use in monitoring treatment response) oncologists often don’t bother wasting money attempting to use these on patients.