The use of laser scanning in the preparation of computerized skin pigmentation and topographic maps

Abstract

This project involves a study of imaging the surfacevariations in both pigmentation and topographical aspect,including a survey of the earlier studies of relevanttopics.Pigmentation and topographic view of skin varies withdifferent types of tissues. Tumors and stains havedifferent color pigmentations. This variance results indifferent absorption levels of light. Using thisphenomenon, a Helium-Neon laser unit was used as the lightsource to investigate the possibility of imaging thesurface pigmentation and topographic variations of thesurface, and monitoring the subcutaneous layers of tissueby means of an experimental setup. The experimental tissueto be scanned was divided into pixels, and each pixel wasilluminated with the laser beam, where the back-scatteredlight intensity was measured via a specially designedabsorption scanning unit. Using computer program, theimages were reconstructed by forming data matrices andassigning a color code for each range of pixel value thatwas predetermined out of these matrices.As a result of this study, it was confirmed that theoccurances on the skin surface and the subcutaneous layersof skin might be detected by using laser as a ligh:source.