Phase I Reflectance confocal microscopy images the cellular and structural morphology of tissue in-vivo or ex-vivo without the need for histological processing. Existing reflectance confocal microscopes use single wavelength laser to generate gray scale intensity images. The goals of this proposal are to build and characterize a coherence reflectance confocal microscope with a broad-band light source synthesized from high-power discrete semiconductor laser sources. Adding this form of coherence imaging to confocal reflectance microscopy offers several enhancements to traditional reflectance confocal microscopy: 1. Increase axial resolution for a given focusing objective numerical aperture (NA), 2. Maintain axial resolution for a reduced NA, 3. Collect both amplitude and intensity information from a sample tissue, 4. Collect intensity information from a sample tissue at several discrete wavelengths. These enhancements will increase the clinical utility of confocal microscopy by allowing deeper imaging in the tissue and improving the specificity of the images by gathering more information about the tissue through heterodyne amplitude detection and multi-wavelength intensity detection.
