Like our eyes, microscopes are limited in what they can see because of their resolution, or their ability to see detail. The detail, or information, from the object is there, but some of it gets lost as the light reflecting off of the object moves through the air.
“The whole premise of this is built on one single fact—the way light interacts with any matter is linear,” said Kamilov, assistant professor of electrical & systems engineering and computer science & engineering. “But the reality is that the interaction is actually not linear.”
For example, if you shine a flashlight through your hand, you can’t see the source of the light because it’s bending, and that is nonlinearity. With a single cell, the bending is so light that it is nearly transparent, which is linear.
When light interacts with a cell or an object, the light going out of the cell loses the information it gathers from that interaction. But because of that interaction, there are fluctuations in the vicinity of that cell that work with such matter and get retransformed and remitted. Those fluctuations are encoded into the nonlinearity of the interaction, but today’s microscopes are unable see this, Kamilov said.
“We want to take into account this nonlinear interaction of light, objects and premises, and if we do it correctly, we can extract that information, which normally disappears in a current microscope and is treated as ‘noise,'” Kamilov said. “We want to decode the information from the noise and add it back into the resolution, and that should give us features that are smaller than the resolution limit.”
Kamilov said there are two types of noise: imperfections and mathematical noise that is the result of science’s current limitations. It is the mathematical noise that he wants to capture.
Image Credit: Washington University in St. Louis
News This Week
A potential milestone in cancer therapy
Researchers from the University of Bern, Inselspital, University Hospital Bern, and the University of Connecticut have made a significant breakthrough in the fight against cancer. They identified a previously unknown weak point of prostate [...]
Cardiovascular Crystal Ball: New Tool Predicts Future Heart Disease Risk
Faculty members at the UM School of Medicine have created a cutting-edge tool that enables the early identification and assessment of risks in vulnerable patients. Heart disease, being the leading cause of death globally, [...]
Scientists analyze a single atom with X-rays for the first time
In the most powerful X-ray facilities in the world, scientists can analyze samples so small they contain only 10,000 atoms. Smaller sizes have proved exceedingly difficult to achieve, but a multi-institutional team has scaled [...]
AI Demonstrates Superior Performance in Predicting Breast Cancer
AI algorithms outperformed traditional clinical risk models in a large-scale study, predicting five-year breast cancer risk more accurately. These models use mammograms as the single data source, offering potential advantages in individualizing patient care [...]
Stanford Medicine Reveals: Tiny DNA Circles Defying Genetic Laws Drive Cancer Formation
Tiny circles of DNA harbor cancer-associated oncogenes and immunomodulatory genes promoting cancer development. They arise during the transformation from pre-cancer to cancer, say Stanford Medicine-led team. Tiny circles of DNA that defy the accepted laws of [...]
Death to Blood Cancer Cells: New Drug Combination Could Revive the Power of Leading Treatment
Future clinical trials will be conducted to investigate whether the combination of chloroquine and venetoclax can prevent disease recurrence. Although new drugs have been developed to induce cancer cell death in individuals with acute [...]
Illuminating Science: X-Rays Visualize How One of Nature’s Strongest Bonds Breaks
Scientists have deciphered how an activated catalyst breaks down the strong carbon-hydrogen bonds in potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a study published in Science. Using advanced X-ray technology and quantum-chemical calculations, they tracked the [...]
Using magnetic nanoparticles as a rapid test for sepsis
Qun Ren, an Empa researcher, and her team are currently developing a diagnostic procedure that can rapidly detect life-threatening blood poisoning caused by staphylococcus bacteria. Staphylococcal sepsis is fatal in up to 40% of [...]
Leave A Comment