ABSTRACT
Basic understanding of normal skin appearance on reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) is necessary for an appropriate appreciation of the features characterizing pathologic processes in general.
In vivo RCM produces real-time, horizontal optical sections of the skin layers with a thickness of <5 µm, and with lateral resolution of 0.5-1 µm. Those characteristics allow the in vivo visualization of superficial skin and other tissues with cytological resolution close to standard histopathology. Ex vivo RCM allows for optical sectioning in any plane and from any tissue edge.1 RCM is a relatively new approach to skin microscopy in comparison with conventional histopathology and microscopic examination of excised human skin that is generally done on 5 µm thick sections in the vertical plane.
