Patent ID: 7400754

Claim:
An apparatus for imaging chromophores in skin comprising: a camera; crossed-polarizers mounted on the camera through which polarizers an image of the skin is taken; and a computer coupled to the camera for taking crossed-polarized image to provide spatially resolved chromophore indices, where the camera produces an RGB pixel image and where the computer transforms the image into CIE L*a*b* color space, where the computer provides a relative a* image (Δa*) of a region of interest modeled pixel-by-pixel on Δ ⁢ ⁢ a * = 100 ⁢ ( a Pws * - a Ns * a Ns * ) where a*PWS is the raw a* indice in the image and a*NS the average a* indices of representative regions of normal skin selected near to the region of interest.