A technique for near-infrared autofluorescence imaging of skin-preliminary results.

Han X, Lui H, McLean DI, Zeng H.

Melanin is essentially a nonfluoresent material under ultra-violet (UV) and short wavelength visible light excitation. However, fluorescence emission from in vivo cutaneous melanin has recently been detected spectroscopically under near-infrared (NIR) excitation by our group. The objective of this study is to develop an in vivo NIR autofluorescence imaging system for direct observation and characterization of melanin distribution in human skin. In the imaging system, light coming from a 785 nm diode laser is coupled into a ring light guide to uniformly illuminate the skin surface. The fluorescence or reflectance light is collected by an NIR-sensitive CCD camera with and without long-pass filters. Both reflectance and autofluorescence images of nevi from three volunteers were obtained with exposure time of less than 1 second. In NIR autofluorescence images the pigmented areas showed higher fluorescence than adjacent normal skin, thus confirmed the previous spectroscopic results and demonstrated great promises for using NIR autofluorescence for evaluating pigmented skin lesions.

SPIE 2006; Vol. 6078.

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