New model simulates the temperature rise of laser-heated skin

Laser treatment is now commonplace across various fields of medicine including dermatology, where it is commonly used to remove scars, wrinkles, and freckles. The technology, however, has a major downside: despite continued improvements, medical accidents related to laser treatment has been on the rise, with studies revealing excessively high laser energy as the major cause of such accidents.

Assistant Professor Takahiro Kono from Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT), Japan, whose research is focused on the mechanism of heat transfer involved in the interaction of laser light with biological tissue explains, "The difficulty lies in adjusting the laser conditions for each patient according to their skin color." According to Dr. Kono, it is necessary to take into account the effect of melanosomes--light-absorbing pigments that color our skin--scattered throughout the skin tissue instead of simply considering the skin as a bulk heat absorber. "In pigmented skin, laser light is discretely absorbed by the melanosomes that subsequently act as point sources of heat. This would explain the link between treatment failure and pigmentation, as the degree of pigmentation determines the number and density of these point heat sources," says Dr. Kono.

With this knowledge, Dr. Kono and his colleagues from SIT and Yamagata University, Japan, recently proposed, in a study published in the END