There is a thought provoking work published this week resulting from a collaboration between AMOLF in the Netherlands and PNNL where C60-SIMS has been coupled to a high performance FTMS. The mass resolution and accuracy are just what you would expect for this analyzer, so the experiment seems to work very well. The major stumbling block so far is in the imaging. According to the authors, spectral acquisition time is in the 1-20 sec range. For a 256×256 pixel image, an image would require 18 to 364 hours to obtain. A similar observation was made a few years ago in the Caprioli lab for imaging MALDI.
If the speed could be increased, it would be a fantastic imaging tool.