In his 1917 "On Quantum Theory of Radiation" paper Albert Einstein introduced the concept of amplification of
radiation through stimulated emission with coherence. This concept had not been applied in practice until 1952 when
Joseph Weber, followed by Townes, Basov and Prokhorov, developed the theory and started working on the construction
of masers. The first maser was demonstrated by Townes' team in 1953. Many researchers began thinking about making
an "optical maser", but the transition from centimeter to nanometer waves posed a problem. Well funded researchers in
the USA and Soviet Union put their efforts into making an "optical maser". In May 16, 1960 an unknown and
underfunded researcher, Theodore Harold Maiman, won the race and demonstrated a fully functional ruby laser. The
scientific world was astonished by its simplicity and elegance. Maiman's short paper describing the invention appeared
immediately in Nature magazine. This invention caused an avalanche of new laser developments followed by the
growing number of applications in almost all fields of our lives. Ted Maiman died in 2007 in Vancouver, just 13 days
before the 47th anniversary of the invention of the laser. The intention of this paper is to focus on the life of the scientific
maverick and great man.
This paper summarizes the accomplishments to date in the development of the "artificial eye" - a fully functional eye prosthesis - which we hope to use in the future as an implant in people who have lost their vision due to eye damage. The future work necessary to bring the eye project to fruition is explained, and two important tasks, which we do not yet know how to solve, are described in the hope of stimulating a broad discussion within the scientific community. The summary of the historical developments in this field is followed by our accomplishment. The components of the eye that have been developed and tested to date are color processing receptive fields, variable-focus lenses, and local and global brightness adaptation systems. A constraint imposed on the components of the artificial eye is the requirement of minimal or no power draw. Following this condition, the components were developed using mainly passive, photonic properties of nonlinear optical materials. Color receptive fields are fabricated of photo-luminescent concentrators and photovoltaic detectors set in a multilayer stacked system allowing for color processing. Local and global adaptation is accommodated using the photochromic properties of some nonlinear optical materials. A variable focus lens is made of transparent elastic membranes filled with a refractive liquid, and focal length is changed by radial stretching. This modification to the lens was made to accommodate cataract patients. Two important aspects of the research, which are yet unsolved, include proper encoding of visual signals before transmission to the brain and methods for physical transmission of the encoded signals to the visual cortex.
An optical system injecting light directly to skin and collecting spectrally modified within skin backscattered portion of light has been designed and fabricated. This method reduces the noise generated by specular component nearly to zero. Seven clinical tests performed on patients with suspect skin lesions have been tested with our device and later biopsy was taken as a “gold standard” procedure. Three cases proved to be melanoma and our spectra indicated differences from those collected from non-melanoma lesions. The process of collecting spectral data was too time consuming.
To accelerate the process of data collection from the skin, using the same principle of diffuse spectroscopy, an imaging device was conceived which is able to collect skin spectral response at once from a relatively sizeable skin area. The requirement of a negligible specular component was considered of paramount importance. Two approaches can satisfy this requirement:
1. Collection of backscattered light directly from the skin
2. Injection of illuminating light directly to the skin without creating reflections directly from the skin.
We decided to use the second approach and construct a circular, circumferential illuminator with angled light injection. Before fabricating this illuminator, a thorough analysis was performed to optimize its radius and angle of injection in order to receive the highest uniformity of diffuse light in the skin. Monte-Carlo simulation was applied to a three layer skin approximation.The results of the simulation will be presented.
Exact color matching of dental restorative materials to vital teeth is a difficult task. There are several reasons for this difficulty and they will be elaborated upon in the presentation. One of the most important reasons is the fact that teeth, as well as dental restorative materials are translucent, and thus the color impression is a product of light scattering, back scattering, transmission, and spectral modifications inside of these objects. Classic colorimetry is insufficient to provide an exact color match. Additional information about the translucency factor of the considered object (material and geometry) is necessary to provide full reproducibility. Translucency has a direct effect on perceived brightness.
In this article we describe the TransluDent, a complementary product to ColorDent, which measures translucency of teeth and dental materials. TransluDent determines translucency by measuring light transmitted through an object and light scattered inside of the object.
The translucency measurements were performed on two groups of subjects. One group consisted of people in their twenties and the second group of subjects was in fifties. For comparison several sets of dental shade-guides were also tested. The great discrepancy in translucency factor between human teeth and popular on the market shades may explain difficulty in color matching of dental restorative materials to teeth.
A novel hypericin-based drug HyperflavTM has been evaluated for light-induced fluorescence detection of oral cancer. Squamous cell carcinoma was induced with carcinogenic agent in right pouches of forty hamsters (20/20 males/females). Solution of HyperflavTM was sprinkled into stomach with a single dose 0.2 - 4 mg of pure hypericin per kg b.w. and 4 - 8 hours before fluorescence analysis. In two animal groups with cancer symptoms the autofluorescence and hypericin-induced fluorescence were taken under 442 nm excitation. The buccal mucosa and adjacent areas were measured fiberoptically in-vivo and in-vitro using orange/green ratio (610/540). The in-vivo fluorescence imaging of malignant areas was conducted to assist the biopsy guidance and to compare with white-light images. Histological and morphological analyses were performed from biopsies. Oral squamous cell carcinoma in its early stage demonstrated specific higher 610/540 ratio for 37 tested hamsters. Advanced state involved another higher fluorescence maximum around 640 nm that in our opinion caused by strong porphyrin-induced native fluorescence. Such deformation of fluorescence spectra may lead to inadequate perception of diseased tissue area. To avoid this problem the autofluorescence spectra & images were added. HyperflavTM application is promising for demarcation of early oral cancer when combined with autofluorescence measurements.
Assessment of tooth color by visual evaluation is a complex task. A number of attempts to build a reliable instrument that can measure the color of teeth have been undertaken in the last 15 years. These attempts were aimed at using conventional colorimeters designed for color measurement of oblique objects. However, the translucency of teeth strongly affected the colorimeters' readout because of the size of the measuring aperture and the geometry of the spectroscope. Here we present the results of our spectroscopic study of dental materials and human teeth that show a characteristic behavior of optical spectra collected with a fiberoptic probe. The probe consisted of 300 micrometer irradiating and 1 mm detecting fibers that were coupled to a white light source (color temperature 6500 K) and to a spectroscope. The conventional shades from Vita and Chromascop shade guides were measured with different location of the fibers. The color of the dental shades was measured by a standard spectrophotometer with two different apertures. We found that registered spectra depended on fiber position and color coordinates changed with aperture size. The influence of the fiber positioning was approved with color measurement of vital teeth. A simplified colorimetric system based on two color coordinates, lightness L*, and the difference, (a* - b*), has been proposed. Finally, we describe a novel dental color matching device based on a fiberoptic probe. The device is able to classify all dental shades from Vita, Chromascop, and Bioform shade guides and is aimed at better color matching of restorative materials to native teeth.
Thin-film luminescent concentrators were studied as novel position sensitive optoelectronic devices. The concentrators were designed as a 16 X 16 lines grid or as a planar structure of 16 X 16 channels along two coordinates. Minimal distance between two lines in grid concentrators was 5 mm. Each line or channel was coupled to silicone photodiode which was connected via analog board and C/D converter to computer. 100-W halogen lamp was projected into concentrators via optical system. Software was developed to determine the center of the light spot and to show its border. Position of the center of the light source was determined with accuracy 0.5 mm. Processing time for this operation was less than 1 ms. The concentrators were able to detect the position of the light source under conditions which were similar to peripheral human vision. Such position sensitive optoelectronics device are promising to build smaller scale integrated device which could be perform of full detection and preprocessing operation in artificial human retina.
We have studied a prototype of human retina which is based on a round thin-film photoluminescent concentrator coupled at its edge to the circular Si-photodiodes. This passive integrated optoelectronic device can perform most important function of peripheral human vision: determination of position of the light source and motion detection. For 12-mm radius film we have got a spatial resolution 13 micrometers in the linear range +/- 5 mm. By stacking several films each with a different absorption characteristic it is possible to realize color sensitive element and, therefore, to perform full functions of human retina.
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