Comments on: Precision motion tracking — thousands of cells at a time

By: Guillermo

Guillermo — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:58:51 +0000

I agree with the comments, this is a really ingenious and cool technique. I like to measure the innovation of the articles (at least with respect to me) by reading the headline and trying to figure out how would I do what they have done. And in many cases, I am trully baffled. This is one of those!

By: MikeB

MikeB — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:39:24 +0000

And they’re sure the rare, tight helical motion isn’t an artifact of the tracking algrorithm, right?

By: Bri

Bri — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 23:07:16 +0000

The real star here is the software. Using red and blue light to illuminate subjects doesn’t need to be only in the microscopic range. Complex behaviors of many things could be analyzed with this technique. Crowd control could analyze the driving forces of mob behavior. Swarming behaviors could be analyzed from insects to fish.

By: asiwel

asiwel — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:25:05 +0000

Good thing they didn’t have this gadget back when studying Brownian motion under a microscope, trying to determine random-walk particle velocity. The more closely they looked, the longer the distance traveled by each “particle” in unit time (i.e., it was a fractal they were magnifying). This lens-free holographic imaging technique is really a clever and powerful sensing methodology suitable for a wide variety of purposes. It could track cloud formations from space or wavelet motions in the oceans as well as much faster swarms of things.