University of Rochester professor of optics Jannick Rolland has an optical technology that offers unprecedented image below the surface. The purpose of technology to track and skin lesions to determine whether they are benign or cancerous without consideration of suspected tumor excised from the skin and to laboratories for analysis. Place the tip of about one meter long cylindrical tube is in contact with tissues, and a few seconds a bright, high resolution, 3D-image of what lies beneath the surface.

Rolland presented its findings in 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, on February 19.

“I hope that in future, this technology can be considerable inconvenience and expense to remove from the process of diagnosis of skin lesions,” says Rolland. “When a patient comes into the clinic with a suspicious mole, for example, they do not have the necessary surgical dissection of skin or have an expensive and time-consuming MRI done. Instead, relatively few can draagbaar recording unit, which will assist in the classification of lesions on the right in the doctor’s office.”

The device does this by using a unique installation of the liquid lens developed by Rolland and her team for a process known as Optical Coherence Microscopy. In the liquid lens, a drop of water takes place in a standard glass lens. If the electric field around the changes in water drops, drop shape changes, thereby changing the lens focus. This allows the device to thousands of images, aimed at different depths beneath the surface of the skin to take. The combination of these images creates a completely focused image in all tissues up to 1 millimeter deep into the human skin, the basic structure of the tissue. Since the device uses near-infrared light rather than ultrasound images of precise micro-scale resolution, instead of millimeter-scale resolution.

The process was successfully tested in vivo in human skin and various papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Rolland said the next step is to start in clinical studies, so that its ability to distinguish between different types of lesions can be assessed.

Rolland joined the faculty Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Institute of Optics in 2009. She Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Associate Director of RE Hopkins center of the optical design and engineering.