Lasers for in-vivo skin diagnostics: some recent developments

The recent advancements of three laser-based diagnostic technologies developed at the Riga group are briefly reviewed: (i) RGB imaging of cw-laser excited skin autofluorescence intensity and photobleaching rate distributions, (ii) ps-laser excited skin autofluorescence and diffuse reflectance kinetics analysis, (iii) snapshot RGB skin chromophore mapping under triple-laser illumination. These techniques have passed preliminary laboratory and clinical tests which have demonstrated a promising potential for further implementation in portable devices for routine clinical applications. Operation principles, set-up schemes and some clinical results obtained by the above-mentioned techniques are discussed in this paper.