Non-contact dermatoscope with ultra-bright light source and liquid lens-based autofocus function

Abstract

Dermatoscopes are routinely used in skin cancer screening but are rarely employed for the diagnosis of other skin conditions. Broader application is promising from a diagnostic point of view as biopsies for differential diagnosis may be avoided but it requires non-contact devices allowing a comparably large field of view that are not commercially available today. Autofocus and color reproducibility are specific challenges for the development of dermatoscopy for application beyond cancer screening. We present a prototype for such a system including solutions for autofocus and color reproducibility independent of ambient lighting. System performance includes sufficiently high feature resolution of up to 30 μm and feature size scaling fulfilling the requirements to apply the device in regular skin cancer screening.