Acousto-optic devices and components for biomedical applications

Modern acousto-optic devices are often elaborated specially for application in biomedical areas, especially for fast and reliable medical diagnostics. Among all the diversity of acousto-optic devices and components, the acousto-optic tunable filters (AOTF) look the most suitable to be used in this application area. The traditional spectrometers which could be applied for biomedical analyses, contain a light source providing light of wide spectrum, and a set of selective filters (for example, interference filters) which are usually involved in a turret. Hence, the mechanically moving parts must take place in such a device which makes the rate of measurements rather small. Also the diffraction gratings can be used in order to divide the total white light into the spectral components, however, these components are propagated into different directions, and the mechanically moving parts look to be necessary again. Only AOTF application provides the possibility to guide the different spectral components of light into the same direction. We also have proposed a new kind of light source for the spectrometer based on the set of light emitting diodes (LEDs) which allows to control the spectral composition of output light in real time. The device allows to solve the problem of fast and reliable performance of biochemical liquids analyses. Moreover, we consider the possibility to perform some non-invasive methods of analyses using the light reflected from human skin. Another way to use the acousto-optic spectrometer with controlled light source based on LEDs is multispectral processing of the biological objects color images. These problems are considered in details, and the possibility to use the Mancill's theory of color vectors in order to maximize amount of information obtained from the color images, is also discussed.