ABSTRACT
High-speed communication in excitable cell networks may represent the fastest events generated by living cells, but there are other biophysical processes that can take advantage of high-speed imaging technologies. High-resolution scientific imaging cameras, such as those employed in life science laboratories and used in astronomy, maximize signal quality by digitizing camera data slowly. Modern high-speed scientific imaging cameras achieve high frame rates using diverse strategies. The most common approach is to trade spatial resolution for speed. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor designs are intrinsically faster than conventional Charge-coupled devices as the digitization process can be highly parallelized. CMOS active-pixel sensor architectures allow for chip designs to be optimized for high speeds, for example, it is relatively simple to have digitizers on all pixel columns or even every pixel. Temporal pixel multiplexing is a relatively new imaging modality that promises the speed of in situ image storage with a high degree of user flexibility in both spatial resolution and frame rate.
