The gigapixel camera is essentially 34 microcameras in one and has a high enough resolution to zoom in to a tiny suspicious freckle — making inexpensive routine screenings available to a larger number of people. Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer type in the U.S., and it's also the deadliest form of skin cancer. But if caught early enough though, it is almost always curable.

The camera is capable of taking snapshots of the entire human body and rendering high-resolution images of a patient’s skin that may help doctors spot cancer early and save lives, the researchers said.

“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, who helped lead the research that led to the camera’s development. “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.”

 

Research on the camera will be presented at the Optical Society's annual meeting this month in Tucson, Ariz.