Photos: Getting the skinny on skin

Raj Chhibber, CEO and founder of BrighTex Bio-Photonics, at his company's offices in San Jose, Calif. BrighTex is among about 10 emerging biotech companies in the bioscience innovation center.

A view of the Facial Stage, in which patients get their close-up. Once an individual rests his or her chin inside the imaging device, it automatically captures two photos of the face, including details of the skin's surface and subdermis. "Safe UV capture," or a photo-shooting process equivalent to 30 seconds in the sun and harmless to the skin, collects details below the skin's surface. A white-light image captures details of the surface.

Clarity Pro takes photo images of a patient's skin in white light and then, with software, analyzes its health. Here it shows various forms of skin condition, including three different depictions of dry skin and its severity in white on the patient's face and in red in the graphs.

Technology known as flourescence spectroscopy, which shows the interaction of light within tissue, has long been used to find biochemical changes in the skin. Here it depicts damage from UV rays.

BrighTex Bio-Photonics uses facial-recognition and image-processing algorithms to develop coordinates for the face and then target analysis for specific areas.

Here the Clarity Pro software shows images of the depth and severity of a patient's wrinkles.