UCLA develops world’s fastest camera to hunt down cancer in real time

And another thing to put it into perspective: https://www.google.com/search?q=30%20trillion%20%2F%20200000...

Well, a better statistic is the false positive rate. They have a one in a million false positive rate. If they did do a full scan, they would have 30 MILLION false positives. If they improve their speed a 1000 fold, it brings their scan time to a day and a half. If they improve their false positive rate by a 1000, they would still have 30,000 false positive events.

Edit: I guess the point is that the purpose of the device is not full scans, nor are full scans really needed, or maybe not even helpful.

To prevent metastasis you would need to be permanently linked-up to this machine. It is more likely to find uses in diagnostics, where you would be able to detect abnormal cells, or cells that have been tagged with a diagnostic tool such as a specially-targeted antibody, in a blood sample that are too rare to be detected by current methods (except PCR).

The original paper also proposes uses in "imaging and detection of bioparticles of interest in oceanography (e.g., phytoplanktons), energy science (e.g., oil emulsions and engineered microbes), environmental science, food science, cosmetics, pharmaceutics, and medicine."