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Things are getting exponentially better due to computing advances.
Why sample? Just do the whole thing at once, and then let a computer sort through the images.
This reminds me of robotic astronomy searches for asteroids that could hit Earth, supernovae, etc. I wonder if some of the camera technology and image searching software comes from astronomy.
Ultrafast Camera Captures Very Early Cancer
An ultrafast camera may help detect cancer before it spreads
Cancer cells that break away from a tumor and metastasize lead to 90 percent of all cancer deaths. ... Finding them, however, can be like searching for a particular needle in a stack of needles. One milliliter of blood contains about five billion red blood cells and nearly 10 million white blood cells but only 10 tumor cells.
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At the heart of the U.C.L.A. system is an ultrafast microscopic camera the researchers introduced in 2009 that captures images at about six million frames per second. ...
The U.C.L.A. camera converts each laser pulse into a data stream from which a high-speed image can be assembled. To the STEAM camera, the investigators have added a microfluidic channel for the cells to flow through and a high-speed image processor that, they say, takes blur-free images. The team used this technology to identify breast cancer cells in blood samples. “We look at a cell's shape, size and texture, as well as its surface biochemistry,” explains lead author Keisuke Goda, who recently moved from U.C.L.A. to the University of Tokyo. “Cancer cells tend to be larger than white or red blood cells. And we know that a cancer cell's shape is ill defined compared with red and white blood cells.” Goda adds that a relatively noninvasive blood test would encourage people to get screened more frequently than they do now.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...s-early-cancer
Why sample? Just do the whole thing at once, and then let a computer sort through the images.
This reminds me of robotic astronomy searches for asteroids that could hit Earth, supernovae, etc. I wonder if some of the camera technology and image searching software comes from astronomy.
Ultrafast Camera Captures Very Early Cancer
An ultrafast camera may help detect cancer before it spreads
...
At the heart of the U.C.L.A. system is an ultrafast microscopic camera the researchers introduced in 2009 that captures images at about six million frames per second. ...
The U.C.L.A. camera converts each laser pulse into a data stream from which a high-speed image can be assembled. To the STEAM camera, the investigators have added a microfluidic channel for the cells to flow through and a high-speed image processor that, they say, takes blur-free images. The team used this technology to identify breast cancer cells in blood samples. “We look at a cell's shape, size and texture, as well as its surface biochemistry,” explains lead author Keisuke Goda, who recently moved from U.C.L.A. to the University of Tokyo. “Cancer cells tend to be larger than white or red blood cells. And we know that a cancer cell's shape is ill defined compared with red and white blood cells.” Goda adds that a relatively noninvasive blood test would encourage people to get screened more frequently than they do now.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...s-early-cancer