Development and clinical evaluation of medical robot assisted photodynamic therapy of port wine stains.

Background: Port wine stains (PWS) are a kind of skin disease for which photodynamic therapy (PDT) has already achieved good results. With manual operation of clinical PDT, the laser density is uneven and laser irradiation of the lesion is arbitrary and non-uniform. In addition, lengthy manual operation tires doctors; thus a robot system has been developed to assist them.

[Imaging port wine stain by optical coherence tomography].

Optical coherence tomography is an appropriate imaging method for biomedical science, due to its advantages of noninvasive nature, high resolution and fast imaging speed. Because most biological tissues have the characteristic of high scattering coefficient, OCT system can just obtain the structural images several millimeters below the surface of the tissues. The superficial depth of OCT's penetration limits application in dermatology field.

[The simultaneous measurements of time-dependent laser-induced fluorescence intensity of hematoporphyrin monomethyl ether in animal tissues with rheumatoid arthritis].

Since the selectivity of photodynamic therapy (PDT) depends on the distribution of a photosensitizer in a tissue during the treatment, an investigation of drug distribution is a key step for performing PDT effectively. The distribution of photosensitizer absorbed in tissues is adjusted by the animal body system, so an apparatus that can measure the fluorescence intensity of photosensitizer in different tissues of the same body simultaneously is in demand. To achieve precise estimate of tissue selectivity of the photosensitizer, a spatially separated three-channel laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection system was set up and employed in the present study to measure the fluorescence intensity of Hematoporphyrin Monomethyl Ether (HMME) in different tissues of the same body simultaneously.