Perturbation factors in the clinical handling of a fiber-coupled Raman probe for cutaneous in vivo diagnostic Raman spectroscopy.

The application of fiber-coupled Raman probes for the discrimination of cancerous and normal skin has the advantage of a non-invasive in vivo application, easy clinical handling, and access to the majority of body sites, which would otherwise be limited by stationary Raman microscopes. Nevertheless, including optical fibers and miniaturizing optical components, as well as measuring in vivo, involves the sensibility to external perturbation factors that could introduce artifacts to the acquired Raman spectra and thereby potentially reduce classification performance. In this study, typical perturbation factors of Raman measurements with a Raman fiber probe, optimized for clinical in vivo discrimination of skin cancer, were investigated experimentally.

Simulation of color perception of layered dental composites using optical properties to evaluate the benefit of esthetic layer preparation technique.

Objectives: Esthetic restorations require that dental restorative materials have similar optical properties to teeth. To improve the color perception, the inhomogeneous morphology of the native tooth can be imitated by layering two optically different restorative materials. However until now the benefit of this method has not been satisfactorily demonstrated.

Optical properties of dental restorative materials in the wavelength range 400 to 700 nm for the simulation of color perception.

Aesthetic restorations require dental restorative materials to have optical properties very similar to those of the teeth. A method is developed to this end to determine the optical parameters absorption coefficient mu(a), scattering coefficient mu(s), anisotropy factor g, and effective scattering coefficient mu(s) (') of dental restorative materials. The method includes sample preparation and measurements of transmittance and reflectance in an integrating sphere spectrometer followed by inverse Monte Carlo simulations.