This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Smartphone may be readily available alternative to Wood’s lamp

In vitiligo, visualization and accentuation of lesions using blue light emitted from a smartphone was comparable to a Wood’s lamp and may be useful in resource-poor settings where a lamp is not available, according to researchers.

Radiation from a Wood’s lamp accentuates a vitiliginous lesion. The lack of epidermal melanin facilitates autofluorescence of the dermal collagen, according to researchers.

“This accentuation is used to differentiate vitiligo from other disorders of hypopigmentation and depigmentation,” Sandip Agrawal, MD, and colleagues wrote.

The researchers used a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 smartphone to download a blue image from the internet and save it to the image gallery.

Phone settings were set to increase the brightness intensity of the screen and to prevent screen timeout.

Researchers found visualization and accentuation of vitiliginous lesions comparable to a Wood’s lamp.

“Furthermore, clicking a photo under this setting and subsequent grayscale editing of the picture increases its dynamic range. This highlights the lightest and darkest parts in the picture and facilitates better demarcation of lesions,” Agrawal and colleagues wrote.

In clinical settings lacking a Wood’s lamp, vitiligo examination may suffer, according to researchers.

The blue screen of a smartphone may be a readily available alternative to Wood’s lamp. – by Abigail Sutton

Disclosures: The report no relevant financial disclosures.