The overall goal of this project is to design, fabricate, and test a compact, low-cost, confocal reflectance microscope capable of producing images of skin with quality comparable to those of current commercial instruments. The new design uses a scanner concept in which the optical path is passed through two prisms, which are rotated about the beam axis, resulting in coverage of a circular area. The advantage of this technique over existing commercial devices that use mirror scanners is the decrease in optical path, which leads to a substantially smaller size of the overall device. The concept of scanning using rotating prisms is presently being demonstrated in a breadboard proof-of-principle at Northeastern University. In Phase I, the goals address feasibility demonstration, using the breadboard instrument, and successful miniaturization experiments to determine the configuration of the next generation prototype instrument to be built in Phase II. Images obtained with the breadboard instrument will be compared to those from a commercial point-scanning confocal microscope and quantitative tests will be performed. ? ? ?
