Classification of skin moles from optical spectropolarimetric images: a pilot study.

A new skin-imaging method, which was developed recently, gives an informative image data about skin moles by collecting scattered polarized light reflected from their tissue area at different wavelengths and polarizations. This method is called as optical rotational spectropolarimetric imaging (ORSI), which scans the polarization states by continuously rotating a linearly polarized light incident on the lesion and collecting the reflected sequence of images. A novel method to distinguish cancerous from benign moles by analyzing the images obtained using this imaging system is proposed.