Friday, December 8, 2006
Siascopy Sees Stuff In Skin
Filed under: Dermatology
The good people of Frost & Sullivan have bestowed their European Technology Innovation of the Year award upon UK company Astron Clinica for their SIAscope. Now, we've used scopes of all kinds, from ophthalmoscopes to anoscopes, and had never heard of the SIAscope. But it's real, it's new, and this spectrophotometric intra-cutaneous analysis (SIA, see?) lets doctors see the constituents of skin without hacking it to pieces.
"Astron Clinica's SIAscopy utilises both visible and infrared (IR) light to examine skin components such as blood, melanin, dermal melanin and collagen to a depth of 2 mm below the skin's surface, and provides gross living pathological data on skin lesions," notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Sangeetha Prabakar. "This eliminates the need for other more laborious clinical examination and laboratory analysis procedures."Using sophisticated mathematical models and software programmes, SIAscopy generates images called SIAscans, which can then either be displayed on PCs, viewed separately or overlaid, to demonstrate how skin features relate to one another. This allows physicians to know the exact size of a lesion and make more precise incisions.
We think of it like the VeinViewer, but, you know, for melanoma.
More from Astron Clinica and the basic science behind SIA...
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