Powering Breakthrough Discoveries
Navitar Imaging Technologies: Powering New Medical Devices and Equipment for Breakthrough Discoveries
Speed and discovery. Today medical and life science companies face intense pressure to develop new and innovative products at breakneck speed while meeting strict regulatory requirements. Companies often have world-class teams and instrument specialists with brilliant ideas for the next great medical device that will advance medical science. They just need a better integrated imaging system designed with custom optics, cameras and illumination systems to enable them to achieve what they imagine on the medical frontier. A unique configuration can help companies revolutionize health care.
Navitar manufactures custom lens and camera integrated imaging solutions for OEM manufacturers of medical devices and equipment around the world. Its custom lens designs are helping companies, medical engineers, researchers and Start-ups at the forefront of:
- DNA Sequencing
- Infectious Disease Diagnostics
- Tissue Imaging
- Microfluidic Imaging
- Cancer Diagnostics
- Digital Pathology & Liquid Biopsy
- Live Cell Imaging/In Vitro Diagnostics
- Flow Cytometry
- Cell Sorting, Screening, Imaging, & Viability
- Blood Testing & Diagnostics
Navitar looks at customers’ conceptions with over 60 years of optical design and manufacturing experience behind it, having created thousands of unique lens systems and integrated camera and lens solutions. “We are the innovative partner to turn ideas into reality,” said Navitar CEO Jeremy Goldstein.
Often medical device developers are looking for a better understanding of optics, such as the knowledge that:
The camera sensor and lens are critical components that affect instrument performance.
They must be designed together and actively aligned and integrated for optimized system performance. If camera sensors and lenses are chosen independently and forced to work together without design optimization and alignment, cost overruns often occur trying to debug the imaging system and troubleshoot inconsistent performance from device to device.
Off-the-shelf imaging components can be a frustration. At the heart of many medical instruments is a microscope objective that is the single biggest factor in determining the resolution of the imaging system. Most off-the-shelf microscope objectives are not optimized for a particular application. They are typically set for best performance at the center of the field of view (FOV). Color correction is either limited or too broad, and there is great variability between objectives. That variability is a problem for today’s instrument repeatability requirements. Researchers must keep the variables consistent for better, more reliable data such as when comparing drug therapies to cure cancer or endeavoring to discover new vaccines.
By designing to a customer’s specific application requirements, Navitar’s custom optical designs help reduce system complexity while reducing cost and significantly improving system performance compared to off-the-shelf solutions. The right design configuration of lensing and camera sensors sets new standards for performance with better resolution and sharper images of cells or tissues to see the slightest variations on a wider field, with faster cell analysis and perhaps ten times the data.
The camera sensor resolution and the designed resolution of the individual lens can often be different than the resolution and performance available from the combined standard components. This could be the result of some mismatch between the speed of the lens (f/#), wavelength of light, working distance, and pixel size of the camera sensor. If the alignment of the lens to the camera sensor is not tight enough, even a lens with a specific resolution may not yield the complete system resolution desired. Navitar maximizes final imaging system performance by matching camera sensor pixel size to the ideal diffraction limited imaging optics.
Their design team understands the importance of optical modeling of the right sensor and lens combinations and objective and tube lens combinations that are needed to achieve optimal optical system performance. A thought-out opto-mechanical design can manage electronic and thermal noise and provide customized board-level camera formats to help reduce instrument size, weight, and cost. In-house lens-sensor active alignment processes ensure final system performance is maximized.
Navitar has customized an uncountable number of standard camera features which include the following:
- Custom auto-focus camera systems designed to combine with customer’s unique image acquisition and measurement technology.
- Custom firmware and FPGA code.
- Custom medical grade camera systems with integrated AI and hyperspectral image sensor offering images in segmented wavelengths.
- Customized interfaces designed for proprietary computational imaging methods.
- Dual sensor / stereoscopic systems.
Navitar has experience working with a wide range of equipment makers and applications areas with companies around the world.
Medical device product development takes on a tortuous multidisciplinary pathway involving intellectual property (IP), engineering design and development, and interaction with the FDA. Navitar has an understanding of FDA / ISO 13485 / IEC / FCC / CE requirements and the manufacturing documentation required to facilitate rapid product development and speedy product commercialization.
Navitar’s goal is to deliver unsurpassed, personalized integrated imaging solutions in a timely, cost effective manner. The company wants to set new standards for optical performance while partnering with medical companies in life-changing scientific discovery. Together, Navitar and medical researchers and scientists can drive innovation in science and medicine, to achieve what was once impossible. “Setting new standards for performance and beating the competition doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design,” says Navitar CEO Jeremy Goldstein.