Photographic film and film technology have been put to many uses including an art medium as illustrated by the abstract landscape that I created in 1985. I simply took undeveloped Polaroid film and carefully squashed the developer pod to release developer and form the yellow-orange colored silhouette of a sulfurous cloud-shrouded landscape viewed through a window (Fig. 1). Others have also used Polaroid film for a similar purpose and created more spectacular and diverse abstract images either using a malfunctioning Polaroid SX-70 camera (1) or applying high voltage to instant film (2).
This was created by squashing the developer pods of 4 undeveloped Polaroid instant film sheets and assembling them into a 2 × 2 grid (Larry J. Kricka, 1985) (photograph by Lorna Ebert, Lorna Ebert Photography, NC).
Just as film technology has been unusually repurposed in the name of art, so it has been adapted for use in clinical diagnostics. In retrospect, it is perhaps not unexpected that the major photographic companies eventually exploited their considerable chemistry expertise in the development of clinical diagnostic products, e.g., for clinical chemistry and immunoassay tests.
Photography can be traced back to the early 1800s and the work of Wedgewood, Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot (3), but it would be over 150 years before the Eastman Kodak Company (founded in 1888), the Fuji Photo Film Company (founded in 1934), and the Polaroid Corporation (founded in 1937) diversified their interests and entered the clinical diagnostics arena. None of the companies were new to healthcare—all had developed imaging systems. Kodak developed a photographic paper for x-ray image capture in 1896 (4), as did Fuji in 1936 (5). In the 1990s, Polaroid produced a medical laser imaging system and a camera for emergency medical teams (Polaroid EMS Photo Kit) (6).
In setting their sights on the large and lucrative clinical diagnostics market, none of these companies created a product based on a camera or light sensitive film. Instead, they exploited their expertise in chemistry and the production of ultrathin multilayer chemical coatings. A typical film consists of many superimposed layers; for example, Polaroid Type 600 High Speed Color Land film has 17 separate layers (7) but the diagnostic devices would contain far fewer layers.
The first to enter clinical diagnostics was Kodak with their Ektachem products based on research that began in 1970 (8). They took a transparent plastic film base used in making photographic film, coated it with micrometer-thin layers of reagents, and covered this sandwich of reagent layers (e.g., 1–3 layers) with a porous cellulose acetate–titanium dioxide–spreading layer. A small amount of sample applied to the upper layer spreads out and penetrates the underlying layers, in which successive chemical reactions occur. A color develops in the final layer and the color is measured by reflection densitometry. This revolutionary dry multilayer film element (“slide”) technology represented a major departure from the “wet-chemistry” approach to analysis that had dominated clinical diagnostics.
In Japan, Fujifilm Corporation developed its own multilayer test devices, the DRI-CHEM slides, which used cotton or blended polyester fabric as the spreading layer (9).
The third photographic company to enter clinical diagnostics was Polaroid in a joint venture with Behring Diagnostics (PB Diagnostic Systems, Inc.). They developed a thin-film multilayer fluorescent immunoassay system based on reagents coated onto a clear polyester base. A molded grid served to spread the sample over the upper layer (10).
Today, the various dry film technologies remain successful and have found use in the detection of a wide range of clinically relevant analytes. As for conventional photographic film technology, this too eventually found routine application in the form of high-speed Polaroid film to record light emission in a chemiluminescent point-of-care allergy test (11).
Footnotes
Author Contributions: All authors confirmed they have contributed to the intellectual content of this paper and have met the following 3 requirements: (a) significant contributions to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) drafting or revising the article for intellectual content; and (c) final approval of the published article.
Authors' Disclosures or Potential Conflicts of Interest: No authors declared any potential conflicts of interest.
- Received for publication October 29, 2016.
- Accepted for publication November 2, 2016.
- © 2016 American Association for Clinical Chemistry
