<title>Potential of lasers and optical technologies for clinical applications in dermatology</title>

Abstract

A few recent applications of lasers and optical technologies in clinical dermatology have already shown its potential not only to be objective, accurate, rapid, reproducible, non-invasive, non-destructive methods, but also able to study pathophysiology and biophysics of the skin, qualitatively and quantitatively perform evaluation and monitoring of the dynamics of skin lesions in vitro, ex vivo and especially in vivo, that have not been described before in any textbook of dermatology. Here are demonstrated some data from clinical dermatological studies by using laser Doppler flowmetry, reflectance spectrophotometry, infrared microspectroscopy and fiberoptic near-infrared Raman spectroscopy for investigating pathophysiological and pharmacological aspects of some dermatological diseases, as well technical availability and reliability of utilized techniques for selected purposes in the clinic. Such a survey of a number of applications by a variety of laser and optical technologies aims to receive much more attention by a dermatological community to further introduce new potential applications by using this kind of technologies in the clinical settings, and also to expand interdisciplinary knowledge considering presently determined advantages and disadvantages of the probed instrumentation in the hospital.