Rosacea Support

[rosacea] more technical details on photoderm settings

Jim,

If you got 60 J/cm2 on Epilight (with 3 second recharge time), then this is equivalent to approx
68 J/cm2 on conventional Photoderm machine.  


A little tedious to explain: she has a machine that says "Vasculight" on it,
but it has a GUI that allows operator to choose Epilight or Photoderm. The way
we derived this difference is by first setting same pulse characteristics
(width, delay, triples), then setting fluence to say 42 J/cm2 with Epilight
head, and then visually observing the aggressiveness scale (a sliding bar
indicating effective aggressiveness computed using some unknown [to me ...]
algorithm).  We then switched (via GUI) to Photoderm head, chose identical
pulse settings, and then upped fluence to whatever it took to get identical
reading on aggressiveness scale.  Turns out this was 50 J/cm2, with the delta
of 8 J/cm2 being fairly typical.


The machine is really a lot more complex than I thought originally.  I used to
think that, armed with a 'reasonable' group of settings, I could go to anyone
with a photoderm machine and get a close to optimum treatment, provided the
operator knew what he/she was doing.  I was completely wrong, and it is for
this reason that I totally agree with you that one individual's settings are
potentially misleading for someone else.  Hence, I am a little reluctant to
blindly throw around mine (and other's) settings, but I still think it is
useful, provided people understand the complexity of matching skin types with
machine parameters.


Rick 

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Rosacea Support