BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Current treatments of port-wine stain birthmarks typically involve use of a pulsed dye laser (PDL) combined with cooling of the skin. Currently, PDL therapy protocols result in varied success, as some patients experience complete blanching, while others do not. Over the past decade, we have studied the use of photodynamic therapy (PDT) as either a replacement or adjuvan...

The idea that a pregnant woman may be so frightened by the sight of some deformity on another person that her baby will be affected by a similar defect is widely believed in most parts of the world today; it was also generally believed in the West until the early years of this century. The skepticism that then developed may have derived from lack of an explanatory principle and not from lack of...

TO THE EDITOR Optimization of laser therapy for disfiguring vascular birthmarks is one specific clinical application (Kelly et al., 2005). Current treatment protocols involve the use of high-power pulsed laser irradiation with parameters chosen to induce selective photocoagulation of the targeted blood vessels, a method known as selective photothermolysis (Anderson and Parrish, 1983). Protocol ...

The combination of cryogen spray cooling (CSC) and laser irradiation has proven to be a viable solution to treat various dermatologic vascular disorders, such as port wine stain birthmarks (PWS). PWS patients are treated with laser pulses that induce permanent thermal damage to the target blood vessels. However, absorption of laser energy by melanin causes localized heating of the epidermis, wh...

INTRODUCTION Cryogen spray cooling (CSC) has been used along with pulsed lasers for nearly a decade to irreversibly photocoagulate a variety of vascular lesions. However, the fundamental mechanisms that take place at the skin surface are still incompletely understood. In this work, we built a fast-response temperature sensor with the objective to determine the time in which liquid cryogen remai...

Sometimes early handedness before 1 year of life, or a visual gaze preference that looks as if the child is gazing at people with his or her head turned to one side, may be an important sign that a young child has Sturge-Weber syndrome brain involvement. Parents have reported bringing these clues to the attention of their pediatrician, only to be told that everything is okay. More commonly, the...

Successful treatment of port wine stain (PWS) birthmarks in human skin utilizes cryogen spray cooling (CSC) in conjunction with laser treatment. CSC pre-cools the epidermis to protect it from subsequent laser irradiation which raises the temperature of both the epidermis and the deeper PWS. As the epidermal temperature is depressed by cryogen, damage to the skin surface is minimized while the P...

Thuy L. Phung, MD, PhD, Darryl A. Oble, MD, PhD, Wangcun Jia, PhD, Laura E. Benjamin, PhD, Martin C. Mihm Jr., MD,* and J. Stuart Nelson, MD, PhD Department of Pathology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Dermatopathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts Beckman Laser Institute and Medi...

Cryogen spray cooling (CSC) is a spatially selective heat transfer technique that provides epidermal protection during laser treatment of selected dermatoses, such as port wine stain (PWS) birthmarks. Most numerical studies of CSC-assisted PWS therapies to date assume constant cooling conditions at the skin surface. In the present study, however, we show that cooling conditions at the skin surf...