New UNM device, the quantum dot camera, is like night vision on stereo
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Gadget that sees heat could have uses in medical fields, airport screenings, firefighting security
5/22/2008 - 5/20/08
You can't pour a cup of coffee, sit on a sandstone rock cliff or dump cold water over your head to cool off without a new camera under development at The University of New Mexico knowing about it.The device, called a quantum dot camera, can see in the dark with much better accuracy than normal night vision, its creators say.
And, when hooked to a computer, the camera can also identify several objects by the light, radiation or the heat they emit, making it a kind of smart night vision you could imagine seeing on a robot in one of the Terminator movies.
It's accurate to about one-tenth of a degree Celsius, which gives it a lot of range, said Sanjay Krishna, one of its creators.
"The big fields for this right now are things like medical diagnostics — we think it could possibly be used to see skin cancer," Krishna said. "There are also applications in firefighting, where you can actually see the hot spots through the smoke. And of course there are military applications."
Skin cancer tumors are likely a slightly different temperature than the rest of the body, or they may have other unique signatures the camera can pick up, Krishna said.
And in that vein, he and others on the project are talking to medical experts at UNM's Health Sciences Center about the prospects, he said.
In a demonstration, UNM doctoral student Eric Jang flicked a cigarette lighter in front of the camera, showing tendrils of heat wafting off the top of the flame that aren't visible to the naked eye.
"You can see the fumes from the flames," Jang said, moving his hand across the screen. "You can also see veins in arms, because veins are hotter than the rest of your arm."
The gadget, developed by Krishna and other University of New Mexico scientists, looks a bit like a TV camera that's been swallowed by a hungry computer.
If you put two Styrofoam cups in front of it, one holding ice and one holding coffee, you won't just see the light coming from the cups — you also see the light emitted from the hot and cold objects inside the cups.
And if you put cold water on your face, you can see dark areas dripping down your warmer skin surface. "You could give yourself a water mustache," Krishna said with a laugh.
Quantum dots are tiny objects about one-ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. They are very efficient at working with light particles, called photons, and they can be tuned to specifically absorb certain light frequencies.
So the quantum dots in the UNM camera turn it into a sort of night-vision-on-steroids device. And it can see everything that emits photons, which is pretty much everything above absolute zero, Krishna said.
"You and I are emitting light all the time, although you can't see it," he said. "Any object above zero Kelvin will emit photons."
What the UNM group is trying to do with it now, though, is significantly reduce the cost. And to do that, the camera's developers need to make it operate at temperatures higher than the minus-200 degrees Celsius it currently requires.
"It works great," Krishna said. "But if you don't want to carry a big refrigerator with you all the time, we will need to push the operating temperature higher."
That's highly possible in the next few years, Krishna said, adding if the gadget could work at around minus-100 degrees Celsius, it could drop the cost from about $70,000 now to about $15,000 to $20,000 per unit.
"If we could get it to work at room temperature, we could get that cost down to a few thousand dollars," which is comparable to what off-the-shelf low-end night vision costs right now, Krishna said.
Another feature the scientists would like to add to the camera is the ability to see other colors.
With more colors, it could see more detail, analyzing a landscape and picking out features like sandstone rock or specific chemicals in a smoke plume in a disaster situation, said Majeed Hayatt, another UNM professor working on the camera.
"There are people at the Department of Defense that are interested in this as a way to identify people with facial recognition," Hayatt said. "It could give a unique signature of a person by providing extra information."
Another thing it could do is screen people for illness at airports. An airport in Seoul, Korea, is already doing that with an infrared camera, scanning passengers to see if they have fevers before they get on airplanes, Krishna said.
"If they find somebody with a fever, they can pull them aside and see if they can help, see if the person could be spreading a deadly disease," Krishna said.
So far, the project has been funded mostly from DOD, with some additional funding from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
The scientists have patented their ideas through UNM, and Krishna may consider spinning it off into a New Mexico company at some point, he said, after being nudged by Hayatt.
"We'll see," Krishna said with a laugh. "Maybe."
Contact Sue Vorenberg at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.
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To see a video of the quantam-dot camera, visit www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/.
