Port-wine stains (nevus flammeus, port-wine nevus) are congenital vascular lesions that have psychological and physiological implications for patient care. The location and size of these lesions can lead to complications related to anesthetic management. Facial lesions have the most profound psychological effect on the patient with respect to behavior alterations and reluctance to disclose the ...

Sturge-Weber angiomatosis is a rare, nonhereditary developmental condition characterized by a hamartomatous vascular proliferation involving the tissues of brain and face. A report of a case with facial port wine stains, gingival overgrowth, and dilated ocular vessels is described.

Spectral imaging requires rapid analysis of spectra associated with each pixel. A rapid algorithm has been developed that uses iterative matrix inversions to solve for the absorption spectra of a tissue using a lookup table for photon pathlength based on numerical simulations. The algorithm uses tissue water content as an internal standard to specify the strength of optical scattering. An exper...

Vascular anomalies are a common finding in children. Although most of these lesions are benign, they can be a severe cosmetic problem and cause structural and functional damage to nearby tissues. As a result, physicians are tasked with developing effective treatment options with superior safety profiles. Vascular anomalies may be divided into tumors and malformations. Vascular tumors, such as i...

I applaud Qin et al. for their publication, “Photodynamic therapy of port wine stains – a report of 238 cases”1. Such extensive experience with photodynamic therapy (PDT) for port wine stains (PWS) is impressive and I believe, unequaled in the Western world. In the United States and Europe, pulsed lasers and light sources, especially the pulsed dye laser (PDL; wavelengths = 585 or 595 nm) are t...

We develop a fiber optical coherence tomography (OCT) system in the clinical utility of imaging port wine stains (PWS). We use our OCT system on 41 patients with PWS to document the difference between PWS skin and contralateral normal skin. The system, which operates at 4 frames with axial and transverse resolutions of 10 and 9 mum, respectively, in the skin tissue, can clearly distinguish the ...