Optics in Medicine
For reading a book, Please sign in to your account.
loginWhy Optics in Medicine?
Unlike the present time, medical practitioners of the ancient world did not havethe benefit of sophisticated instrumentation and diagnostic systems, such asX-rays, ultrasound machines, or CT scanners. Visual and manual auscultationswere the tools of the day. Hence, since the early days of medicine, optics has been auseful and powerful technology to assist doctors and all forms of healthcarepractitioners carry out examination and diagnosis of their patients. This is sobecause one of the fundamental aspects of medicine is observation and physicalexamination of the patience’s general appearance. Hence, anything that can help“see”better the condition of a patient will be of aid. As such, optics, as the sciencethat studies the behavior and manipulation of light and images, is an ideal tool toassist doctors gain better visual examination capabilities by providing improvedillumination, magnification, access to small or internal body cavities, amongothers. But it is in reality light and its interaction with living tissues that is at thecenter of what makes optics in medicine possible. Light possesses energy and iscapable of interacting with biological cells, tissues, and organs. Such interactioncan be used to probe the state of such living matter for diagnostics and analyticalpurposes or, it could be used to induce changes on the same living systems and beexploited for therapeutic purposes. The science of light generation, manipulation,transmission, and measurement is known asphotonics. The application of pho-tonics technologies and principles to medicine and life sciences is known asbiophotonics
