AsianScientist (Oct. 2, 2014) – Mantis shrimp eyes are inspiring the design of new cameras that can detect a variety of cancers and visualize brain activity. This research has been published in the Proceedings of the IEEE.
University of Queensland (UQ) research has found that the shrimp’s compound eyes are superbly tuned to detect polarized light, providing a streamlined framework for technology to mimic.
Professor Justin Marshall, from the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ, said cancerous tissue reflected polarized light differently to surrounding healthy tissue.
“Humans can’t see this, but a mantis shrimp could walk up to it and hit it,” he said. “We see color with hues and shades, and objects that contrast—a red apple in a green tree for example—but our research is revealing a number of animals that use polarized light to detect and discriminate between objects.
“The camera that we’ve developed in close collaboration with US and UK scientists shoots video and could provide immediate feedback on detecting cancer and monitoring the activity of exposed nerve cells. It converts the invisible messages into colors that our visual system is comfortable with.”
Prof. Marshall said current scopes and imaging systems used polarised light to detect cancer, but the shrimp-inspired technology aimed to improve and widen these non-invasive detection methods, reducing the need for biopsies and guiding surgical procedures.
“Polarized sun-glasses are the most common technology we use every day, to reduce glare from water and wet roads,” he said. “They work because reflected light from these surfaces is polarized one way and the glasses are polarized the other.”
“Even with polarizing sunnies, the level of sensitivity needed to see neurons fire and reveal cancerous tissue is right at our current limit. Nature has coming up with elegant and efficient design principles, so we are combining the mantis shrimp’s millions of years of evolution—nature’s engineering—with our relatively few years of work with the technology.”
Theoretically, the research could lead to the redesign of smartphone cameras, allowing people to self-monitor for cancers and reduce the burden on health systems, Prof. Marshall said.
The article can be found at: York et al. (2014) Bioinspired Polarization Imaging Sensors: From Circuits and Optics to Signal Processing Algorithms and Biomedical Applications.
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Source: University of Queensland.
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