Gigapixel and multi-gigapixel cameras for better skin cancer screening

Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer type in the United States, and it's also the deadliest form of skin cancer, causing more than 75 percent of skin-cancer deaths.

If caught early enough though, it is almost always curable. Now a camera, capable of taking snapshots of the entire human body and rendering high-resolution images of a patient’s skin may help doctors spot cancer early and save lives.

Developed by a team of researchers at Duke University in North Carolina, the “gigapixel whole-body photographic camera” is essentially three dozen cameras in one, allowing the researchers to image the entire body down to a freckle.

"The camera is designed to find lesions potentially indicating skin cancers on patients at an earlier stage than current skin examination techniques,” said Daniel Marks, one of the co-authors on the paper. “Normally a dermatologist examines either a small region of the skin at high resolution or a large region at low resolution, but a gigapixel image doesn’t require a compromise between the two.”

Example of the detail of part of a 250 megapixel skin cancer screening image for the entire body

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