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UltravioletPhotography

UVIVF techniques used in skin research


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Over the years I've used a number of commercial imaging systems for looking at skin. While most of them were visible light based, a couple of them used UV to induce fluorescence. As such I thought I would share them here in case they are of interest.

 

Courage and Khazaka, Visioscan

This uses UVA induced fluorescence to accentuate surface features on skin, and is used for roughness determination (which I'm not a huge fan of as a technique) but also dry skin measurement - dry skin fluoresces strongly and shows up as white in the image. It's been around for about 20 years now, and to be honest other than a slight improvement in camera resolution, hasn't really changed.

 

http://www.courage-k...-visoscan-usb-e

 

I've used this in the past for dry skin assessment - image analysis looking for parts of the image above a certain brightness. Attached below is a sample image from a very dry leg from a study i ran years ago looking at quantifying dryness with a variety of different skin measurement methods. The dryness shows up as the whiter parts of the image and initially starts along the dermatoglyphic lines, but then eventually spreads across the plateaus in between the lines. This image is just under 1cm by 1cm.

post-148-0-80459700-1496820962.jpg

 

Canfield, Visia

This uses UVA induced fluorescence to look at melanin spots and porphyrins from bacteria on the skin.

 

http://www.canfields...stems/visia-cr/

 

Not the most advanced system in the world, but it as been used to provide interesting data about reducing age spots, and also determining how well cleansers work, and was even tried as an 'in store' demo device to help people understand more about their skin and help them decide what products would be good for them. I understand Canfield have recently started looking at fluorescence at 2 different wavelengths in the visible spectra and have been able to correlate that to different bacterial species.

 

These techniques have been used by the skin research industry for everything from early stage product development and skin understanding through to generating data for supporting advertising claims for products.

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