To evaluate skin pigmentation in different skin layers, there is special light adapter needed in order to take multispectral pictures of skin. As there are different optical properties of skin pigments,  4 different light sources have been chosen.

blue λ= 470 nm – highly absorbed by epidermal melanin

green λ= 576 nm – hemoglobin peak

red  λ= 660nm – epidermal dermal boundary

IR λ= 865 nm – low absorption, sensitive to scattering to measure papillary dermis thickness.

There was lighting source for “Nikon Coolpix E3100” digital camera developed to take multispectral images of skin.

Making adapter

The drawing of  lighting adapter

adabpter drawing
 

The lighting adapter isn’t very hard to build. You just need to make circular PCB and solder LEDs with protective resistors. The PCB image:

                                    PCB Mask                                          REAL view

Circular PCB Circullar PCB

Then soldered LEDs symmetrically to distribute the smooth light:

Circular LEDS Circullar LEDS

Wired LEDS 

LED’s are in row: Red, Green, Blue, and IR, White. White LED is optional, to make normal pictures of skin.

Close LEds 

 

Then I made a hole for camera optics. It also serves as holder of PCB. As you see in front of LEDs I put polarized filter (another is put on optics of camera with polarization axis crossed to this one). This filter is used to filter light reflections from surface layer of skin to remove flares. Then you get the image of deeper skin structure.

Leds behind polarizer

 

The nice shiny LEDs are working:

superbright Led        Superbright LEd

 I had some problems to focus them to one spot. LEDs have not ideal characteristics and they weren’t ideally soldered to board. You can see my effort :)

white focusInfrared FocusBlue FocusGreen focusRed Focus 

I only needed one square centimetter ofregion to be smooth lightened.

 The finished adapter:

Light adapter with controlLIght adapter of Leds

 Light LED

About skin modeling there are other topics created, you’re welcome to read them. There I will put few interesting results about taking photos of skin and lesions.

Here are the matrixes calculated for each color. They are substracted form every picture I made, to make a suggest, that lighting is equal to all points on 1x1cm region:

 



Light smothing matrixes

Lets make some test shoots:

Benign lesion:

Blue                                     Green

          

BlueGreen

Red                                  White

RedWhite

I didntmake Infrared here, as this lession isbenign, and doesnt show any changes in skin structure. 

 Suspicious lesion as you can see Infrared (fig e) picture shows view from deeper skin layers:

 Suspiciuos lession

And here you can see parametric maps generated using model with these images:

Parametric maps 

 Here are images with hair and benign lesion:

Images with Hair 

As this light adapter is hand made and calibration is poor, there still can be good results obtained. This experiment was made to prove, that handheld digital camera and simple lighting adapter can be used to show relative diagnostic results while inspecting skin lesions.