The technology will detect and examine skin lesions (red rashes) to determine whether they are benign or cancerous without having to cut the suspected portion out of the skin and analyze it in a lab.
Instead, the tip of a roughly foot-long cylindrical probe is placed in contact with the tissue, and within seconds a clear, high-resolution, 3D image of what lies below the surface emerges.
"My hope is that, in the future, this technology could remove significant inconvenience and expense from the process of skin lesion diagnosis," says optics professor Jannick Rolland, from University of Rochester in the US, who developed the device.
"When a patient walks into a clinic with a suspicious mole, for instance, they wouldn't have to have it necessarily surgically cut out of their skin or be forced to have a costly and time-consuming MRI done," according to a Rochester University statement.
The device accomplishes this using a unique liquid lens setup developed by Rolland and her team for a process known as Optical Coherence Microscopy.
