'Gigapixel' Camera Can Help Diagnose Skin Cancer Early

WASHINGTON: A high resolution 'gigapixel' camera capable of imaging the entire human body down to a freckle can help doctors spot deadly skin cancer early.

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.

"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 study.

"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," Marks said.

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, causing more than 75 per cent of skin-cancer deaths. If caught early enough, it is almost always curable.

Whole-body photography has already been used to identify melanomas and exclude non-dangerous "stable" lesions, but the approach is typically limited by the resolution of the cameras used.

A commercial camera with a wide-angle lens can easily capture an image of a person's entire body, but it lacks the resolution needed for a dermatologist to zoom in on one tiny spot.

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