Innovation Awards profile: Andor Technology – high performance digital cameras

Skin cancer screening, blood glucose monitoring, spectroscopy-assisted surgery, and airport security monitoring are just some of the applications which can benefit from the new iDus Spectroscopy CCD camera platform from Northern Ireland company Andor Technology.

Known as a low dark current deep depletion camera, the invention overcomes a problem with near-infra-red (NIR) cameras have traditionally suffered from – limited detection capabilities in very low light conditions.

The problem is caused by interference from intrinsic “noise” which can completely or partially mask the optical fingerprint of a sample being examined.

Rather like use an ordinary digital camera in low light conditions the image can suffer from interference from other ambient light sources.

The Andor NIR camera uses a specially designed cooling system to bring it down to minus 100 degrees Celsius thereby improving its sensitivity by minimising the noise or interference generated by the camera itself.

The best analogy is to consider the challenge of seeing a small object sitting in long grass; what Andor is doing is effectively cutting the grass.

The invention came about as a result of feedback from Andor customers. The camera targets the near-infrared part of the spectrum which is just outside of the visible spectrum.

Significant demand
Customers had indicated that they were experiencing problems with the existing generation of cameras due to their inability to deal with increasingly light-starved scientific applications.

This led to the conclusion that there was significant demand for a more sensitive camera operating in this near-infrared region of the spectrum. Andor’s camera is 10 times more sensitive than competing products on the market. This improved sensitivity has benefits across a wide range of applications. With skin cancers a spectrograph can detect and flag cancerous cells before they are visible to standard methods of detection, but the typical signal is very weak and the differences are very subtle.

Andor’s new sensitivity boosted camera is better suited to this purpose allowing the doctor to hold a probe against the skin, get a result on a screen, and almost instantaneously perform a diagnosis.

Infra-red radiation passes through the skin much easier than visible light and this allows a high sensitivity probe to be held against the skin to assess the glucose levels in a person’s blood.

There is also potential to look at other aspects of the blood, such as oxygen content, flow rates, haemoglobin concentrations and so on. In spectroscopy-assisted surgery the surgeon can use the probe to locate the cancer cells, remove them using normal surgery and then check whether they are all removed.

In airport security scanning the Andor camera would make it possible for airport customers to carry liquids through the security barrier following a check lasting no more than eight seconds.

The system looks through the plastic or glass container and can tell whether it contains explosive compounds or not, sounding an alarm if it does.

The camera has been commercially available since April of last year and a significant quantity has already been sold. The company is currently working on a reduced cost version of the camera so that it can target a different market segment to that addressed by the iDus 416.

The camera will reuse much of the technology in the iDus 416 but will be particularly targeted at customers who want to incorporate the camera into their own products, such as a dedicated airport security instrument.