The optical tomographic method in medicine

An infrared (/spl lambda/=990 nm) short pulse (/spl ap/5.10/sup -12/ s) laser was used to irradiate in vivo soft biological tissues. A tomographic device, including this laser, was built to analyze the reflected light pulse to obtain information about the inner biological structure and inner objects, which are of special interest for medicine. The depth of the light penetration (up to 2-3 mm) allows one to use the obtained information in medicine to make conclusions concerning diagnoses of skin diseases, as well as applications in gastroenterology, oncology and transplantology. To extract the necessary information special software for interactive image processing was developed, which includes: equalization procedure, histogram analysis, 2D-filtering, shadow function subtraction procedure, and detection and correction of technological artifacts in images.