It seems in recent times that healthcare has become a largely data based problem, with startups and researchers alike craving the data that is available from low-cost scanning and sequencing technologies to train their machine learning algorithms on.
Whilst both the capturing and processing capabilities are improving at quite a pace, there is always room for improvement, and British startup Optalysys are taking a novel approach by using laser light to parse the data.
It’s an approach that has been unsuccessfully tried for many years without gaining much in the way of acceptance in the marketplace. With Moore’s Law running up against the buffers of what is capable however, the team believe their approach may now have found it’s time.
How it works
The technology works by performing a complex Fourier transformation that allows them to encode data into a laser beam. The data can then be manipulated by forcing the beams to interfere with one another in particular ways. This generates a pattern that is read by a special sensor and fed back into a more conventional computer.
The team believe their approach is better as it boils what would take a current computer a few operations into a single operation.
As with so many innovations, it became feasible in large part because of changes to the ecosystem within which it operates. In this case, it was from improvements in the consumer electronics industry that drove down the cost of spatial light modulators, which are commonly used inside projectors.
There is no actual product on the market yet, although a launch is planned for next year. The target market is believed to be companies processing large amounts of data, such as genomic data.
With current chip designs struggling to maintain the pace dictated by Moore’s Law, it is an industry that’s ripe for new ideas, and this may well be one of them, although of course there are similar moves afoot in areas such as quantum computing that have an equally promising start.
It will be fascinating to see how the industry evolves over the next few years as these projects mature.
