ABSTRACT
Interest in clinical use of reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) has recently been increased, with its successful demonstration of effectiveness in diagnostic and surgical guidance. However, this initial success is currently limited to experienced clinicians, who adopted RCM imaging at early stages and have been using it for research and clinical screening purposes for a while. On the other hand, a majority of the new cohort of users is rather interested in using RCM mostly in clinical practice, where time pressure and strict regulations exist. The current system is manual and depends highly on the experience of the users. This typically leads to variability both in RCM image acquisition and analysis. Therefore, standardized protocols for rapid and consistent imaging as well as standardized image analysis tools to guide patient care must be developed. Beyond the medical needs for such procedures that are described in the other chapters, in this chapter, we will further look into the technical side of the problem and demonstrate how the clinical needs can be dealt with using computer-aided tools, such as computer vision and machine learning algorithms.
