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We investigated whether repeated irradiation with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) at a combination of 470 nm and 525 nm could suppress the progression of experimental periodontitis.A experimental periodontitis model was established in the second, third, and fourth premolars of the mandible in beagle dogs for 2 months. The spontaneous progression of periodontitis was monitored under the specified treatment regimen for 3 months. During this period, the animals were subjected to treatments of either plaque control only (control) or plaque control with LED application (test) at 2-week intervals. The clinical parameters included the probing pocket depth (PPD), gingival recession (GR), and the clinical attachment level (CAL). Histomorphometric analysis was performed using measurements of the length of the junctional epithelium, connective tissue (CT) zone, and total soft tissue (ST).There were significant differences in PPD between the control and test groups at baseline and 12 weeks. When the change in PPD was stratified based on time intervals, it was shown that greater differences occurred in the test group, with statistical significance for baseline to 12 weeks, 6 to 12 weeks, and baseline to 6 weeks. There was no significant difference in GR between the control and test groups at any time points. Likewise, no statistically significant differences were found in GR at any time intervals. CAL showed a statistically significant difference between the control and test groups at baseline only, although significant differences in CAL were observed between baseline and 12 weeks and between 6 and 12 weeks. The proportion of CT to ST was smaller for both buccal and lingual areas in the control group than in the test group.Repeated LED irradiation with a combination of 470-nm and 525-nm wavelengths may help suppress the progression of periodontal disease.

In the current study, a multi-wavelength light-emitting diode (LED)-integrated CMOS imaging device was developed to investigate the effect of various wavelengths on multiple color characterization. Various color pigments (black, red, green, and blue) were applied on both white paper and skin phantom surfaces for quantitative analysis. The artificial skin phantoms were made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) mixed with coffee and TiO2 powder to emulate the optical properties of the human dermis. The customized LED-integrated imaging device acquired images of the applied pigments by sequentially irradiating with the LED lights in the order of white, red, green, and blue. Each color pigment induced a lower contrast during illumination by the light with the equivalent color. However, the illumination by light with the complementary (opposite) color increased the signal-to-noise ratio by up to 11-fold due to the formation of a strong contrast (i.e., red LED = 1.6 ± 0.3 vs. green LED = 19.0 ± 0.6 for red pigment). Detection of color pigments in conjunction with multi-wavelength LEDs can be a simple and reliable technique to estimate variations in the color pigments quantitatively.

The feasible application of double-layered skin phantoms was evaluated to identify artificial blood flow with a Doppler optical coherence tomography (DOCT) system for laser tattoo treatments. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was used to fabricate the artificial phantoms with flow channels embedded. A double-integrating sphere system with an inverse adding-doubling method quantified both the absorption and the reduced scattering coefficients for epidermis and dermis phantoms. Both OCT and caliper measurements confirmed the double-layered phantom structure (epidermis = 136 ± 17 µm vs. dermis = 3.0 ± 0.1 mm). The DOCT method demonstrated that high flow rates were associated with high image contrast, visualizing the position and the shape of the flow channel. Application of the channel-embedded skin phantoms in conjunction with DOCT can be a reliable technique to assess dynamic variations in the blood flow during and after laser tattoo treatments.

Most of the two-photon fluorescence microscopes are based on femtosecond Ti:Sapphire laser sources near the 800 nm wavelength. Here, we introduce a new confocal two-photon microscope system using a mode-locked Yb3+-doped fiber laser. The mode-locked fiber laser produces 13 ps pulses with large positive chirping at a repetition rate of 36 MHz with an average power of 80 mW. By using an external grating pair pulse compressor, the pulse width and the frequency chirping of the laser output are controlled for optimum two-photon excitation. For a given objective lens, the optimum condition was obtained by monitoring the two-photon-induced-photocurrent in a GaAsP photodiode at the sample position. The performance of this pulse width optimized two-photon microscope system was demonstrated by imaging Vybrant DiI-stained dorsal root ganglion cells in 2 and 3 dimensions. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America

Achieving a greater imaging depth with two-photon fluorescence microscopy (TPFM) is mainly limited by out-of-focus fluorescence generated from both ballistic and scattered light excitation. We report on an improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a highly scattering medium as demonstrated by analytical simulation and experiments for TPFM. Our technique is based on out-of-focus rejection using a confocal pinhole. We improved the SNR by introducing the pinhole in the collection beam path. Using the radiative transfer theory and the ray-optics approach, we analyzed the effects of different sizes of pinholes on the generation of the fluorescent signal in the TPFM system. The analytical simulation was evaluated by comparing its results with the experimental results in a scattering medium. In a combined confocal pinhole and two-photon microscopy system, the imaging depth limit of approximately 5 scattering mean free paths (MFP) was found to have improved to 6.2 MFP. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America