Skin cancer detection with a compact multimodal fiber laser multiphoton FLIM tomograph

A clinical multicenter study has been performed on patients with suspicious, potentially malignant, pigmented skin lesions to evaluate the femtosecond fiber laser based compact multiphoton tomograph MPTcompact for high-resolution clinical imaging. Label-free high-resolution optical skin biopsies have been obtained based on two-photon autofluorescence excited at 780 nm, second harmonic generation, dermoscopy with an additional white light imager, and confocal reflectance with the NIR ultrashort laser pulses at 80 MHz. Furthermore, fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) based on time-correlated single photon counting has been performed. Here we report on first clinical results. Multimodal compact multiphoton 3D/4D tomographs may become important label-free clinical highresolution imaging tools to replace in part conventional skin histology based on physically taken tissue samples, fixation, slicing, staining, and 2D light microscopy.