Abstract

Confocal microscopes working fast enough to image living tissue are not new. Disk-scanning confocal microscopes use multiplexing to form real images on video cameras or the observer's retina, and some specialized con-focal microscopes for ophthalmology have been in use for years. Now various approaches extend these techniques to allow video-rate imaging of living tissue at a cellular level with a true laser scanning confocal microscope. We describe here a CLSM (con-focal laser scanning microscope) based roughly in the technology of the scanning laser ophthalmoscope and applied to viewing the cells of the epidermis and dermis- This instrument enabling us to study cell morphology without cutting, so that we have a truly noninvasive biopsy. A confocal microscope based on vertical cavity surface emitting lasers carries the project further toward cellular imaging in live tissue. This microlaser microscope will be small enough to "ride with" the motion of living subjects, and to reach tissue inaccessible to the larger confocal microscope. Both of these instruments have their niches in medical diagnostics, and we expect them to be complementary. The CLSM is already in use and starting work with patients, while the microlaser microscope is just yielding its first images, not yet in real subjects.

© 1995 Optical Society of America