Patent ID: 7279303

Claim:
An in vitro method to determine the presence of an organism in a specimen comprising: providing a source of positrons; directing positrons from said source into a vessel containing said specimen containing said organism so as to form at least one species of positronium by an interaction of said positrons with said organism; noting the timing of the application of said positrons to said vessel; measuring the annihilation of said at least one species of positronium in said vessel; measuring the time delay under in vitro conditions between the time of application of each positron to said vessel and the annihilation of said at least one species of positronium to obtain decay rates characteristic of said organism, each time delay being measured over a substantial time scale, the time scale for determining each time delay being in the range from about 5 to 140 nanoseconds; and determining the presence of said organism as a function of the decay rate of said at least one species of positronium by correlating with known decay rates stored in a database.