I love stories like this, about how people are making use of off-the-shelf technologies to mimic the effects of more sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment. Yay DIY!
The slow march of optical spectroscopies toward the clinic has been helped along by technologies borrowed from communications electronics. Those technologies are allowing optics researchers to build things that would have been inconceivable or prohibitively expensive a decade ago. For example, Tromberg’s students were able to build a spatial frequency domain imaging system using an off-the-shelf digital light projector. In addition to using it to image their thesis adviser’s bicycling injuries, they have used it to measure the oxygenation of skin flaps during reconstructive breast surgery.
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