Noninvasive Topical In Vivo Imaging of Skin: Confocal Reflectance Microscopy and Polarized Light Imaging

Topical, noninvasive, label-free imaging of skin can be accomplished using a variety of techniques. This chapter discusses two methods that are sensitive to the structure of tissue on the 10-10-μm scale because they are based on light scattering, as opposed to methods, such as fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy that inform about the chemical composition of a tissue. The two methods are: (1) confocal reflectance imaging that includes both confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM) and optical coherence tomography (OCT), and (2) polarized light imaging, which is sensitive to both light-scattering structures and birefringent fibers like collagen and actin-myosin.