A new technology has been developed by the American company Fluid Imaging Technologies that combines the benefits of a particle counter and microscopy. This system, called the FlowCAM, consists of a microscope outfitted with a high-resolution digital camera that continuously images particles as they pass through a flow cell in a liquid.  Each particle is isolated from the overall view of the flow cell in real time by the software and stored as a separate particle image. As each particle image is stored, over 23 different particle characteristics can be calculated and saved in a spreadsheet fashion, with each row of the spreadsheet indexed to the individual particle image with which the measurements are associated. This indexing enables the software to present the results of typical spreadsheet operations such as sorting and filtering not only as tabular data, but also simultaneously in visual fashion by displaying the particle images associated with the sorting and filtering results.

Since the measurements are made directly from the image, simple measurements such as ESD, length, width, area and volume can be made, along with more complex measurements such as transparency, perimeter, elongation and roughness. These more complex measurements help to describe the particle in higher-level visual terms similar to those that would be used by the eye/brain to distinguish different particle types from each other. The more particle parameters measured, the easier it becomes to algorithmically differentiate particle types using pattern recognition software.