Smartphone confocal microscopy for imaging cellular structures in human skin in vivo

Esther E Freeman; Aggrey Semeere; Hany Osman; Gary Peterson; Milind Rajadhyaksha; Salvador González; Jeffery N Martin; R Rox Anderson; Guillermo J Tearney; Dongkyun Kang

doi:10.1364/BOE.9.001906

Smartphone confocal microscopy for imaging cellular structures in human skin in vivo

Biomed Opt Express. 2018 Mar 26;9(4):1906-1915. doi: 10.1364/BOE.9.001906. eCollection 2018 Apr 1.

Authors

Esther E Freeman¹, Aggrey Semeere², Hany Osman³, Gary Peterson⁴, Milind Rajadhyaksha⁴, Salvador González^{4

5}, Jeffery N Martin⁶, R Rox Anderson³, Guillermo J Tearney^{3

7

8}, Dongkyun Kang^{3

9

10}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
² Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Mulago Hospital Complex, P.O. Box 22418, Kampala, Uganda.
³ Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
⁴ Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 16 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA.
⁵ Department of Medicine and Medical Specialties, Alcalá University and Ramon y Cajal Hospital, Ctra. De Colmenar Viejo, Km. 9,100, 28034 Madrid, Spain.
⁶ Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, 550 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
⁷ Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
⁸ Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁹ College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, 1630 E University Blvd, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Arizona, 1127 E James E. Rogers Way, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.

Abstract

We report development of a low-cost smartphone confocal microscope and its first demonstration of in vivo human skin imaging. The smartphone confocal microscope uses a slit aperture and diffraction grating to conduct two-dimensional confocal imaging without using any beam scanning devices. Lateral and axial resolutions of the smartphone confocal microscope were measured as 2 and 5 µm, respectively. In vivo confocal images of human skin revealed characteristic cellular structures, including spinous and basal keratinocytes and papillary dermis. Results suggest that the smartphone confocal microscope has a potential to examine cellular details in vivo and may help disease diagnosis in resource-poor settings, where conducting standard histopathologic analysis is challenging.

Keywords: (170.1790) Confocal microscopy; (170.1870) Dermatology.

Abstract

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