Tag: technology

The HILIGHT Project has reached a new stage in detector development, with recent tests confirming both advanced temporal performance and successful integration into a microscopy platform.

Recent experimental work has demonstrated two key advances in the performance and readiness of the HILIGHT detector. First, the minimum achievable gating window width has now been fully characterised, with measured values below 1 ns. This level of temporal control is essential for time-resolved measurements and supports the detector’s use in fluorescence lifetime imaging.

Second, the HILIGHT detector has been successfully coupled to a microscope, enabling the acquisition of the first images from a Convallaria majalis sample. At this stage, the images represent standard photon count measurements rather than fluorescence intensity or lifetime images. These measurements serve to validate optical coupling, alignment, and detector operation within a microscopy environment.

Together, these results mark an important step toward full system-level FLIM measurements. The first fluorescence lifetime images using the HILIGHT detector are expected as integration and testing progress.

We look forward to sharing further updates as detector validation and system integration continue across the HILIGHT consortium.

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A patient lies in the operating theatre surrounded by a medical team.  Armed with their experience, a surgeon is excising a tumour and decides how much tissue around the tumour should be removed. Be too conservative, and the probability of tumour reoccurrence increases; be too radical, and the patient’s quality of life might be compromised. The analysis of tissues to determine the type and precise location of disease (a medical discipline called histopathology) is critical to ensuring patients live longer and healthier lives. However, the current time constraints associated with obtaining actionable results often impede its use at the point of care and in intraoperative settings, leading to delayed decisions for disease management.

While advanced optical imaging technologies for real-time histology exist, their widespread adoption faces obstacles such as prohibitive costs, large equipment sizes, and specialized expertise required for deep-tissue analysis. The European HILIGHT consortium, consisting of leading academic and industrial innovators from the III-V Lab (France), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK, Italy), the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM, Switzerland), VivaScope GmbH (Germany), and Brunel University London (United Kingdom), is set to address these challenges head-on.

HILIGHT has secured a substantial grant of €3.2 million (£2.8 million) from the EU HORIZON to bring real-time and cost-effective digital diagnostic tools to the forefront of healthcare. “We are thrilled to announce the consortium’s successful funding bid to innovate, develop, and deploy groundbreaking laser and detection technologies dedicated to instantaneous digital histopathology and optical biopsies,” says Dr Alessandro Esposito, a lecturer at Brunel University London and lead of the quantitative cancer biology group. “Our long-term ambition is to create technologies that ‘see’ cancer and other pathologies affecting human tissues, implementing affordable digital solutions for a sustainable future in healthcare. Driven by our interdisciplinary expertise, our role in Brunel is to redesign technology workflows and biochemical assays, ensuring that the sophisticated innovations developed are field-deployable in real-case scenarios for both diagnostics and biomedical research”

This venture builds on the success of prior collaborations among the consortium partners, providing a strong foundation for seamless interaction and the effective implementation of the proposed work plan. Beyond advancing biomedical imaging technologies, the HILIGHT consortium is committed to contributing to European resilience and competitiveness in the manufacturing of solid-state technologies.