Steven L. Jacques, Ph.D., Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Oregon Graduate Institute, Portland, Oregon, USA. email: sjacques@ece.ogi.edu, http://omlc.ogi.edu
next page last page front page OMLC.	The basic idea.

Human skin presents a multilayered tissue, an epidermis and underlying dermis, which presents a regular texture to the doctor. As cancer grows into the dermis, the birefringent collagen of the dermis is replaced with a less birefringent cellular mass. Our goal is to visualize this perturbation.

	The doctor's view of surface shows cancer as a subtle perturbation. Imaging with polarized light enhances this optical perturbation.