Light-Emitting Woven Fabric for Treatment with Photodynamic Therapy and Monitoring of Actinic Keratosis

A successful photodynamic therapy (PDT) requires a specific photosensitizer, oxygen and light of a specific wavelength and power. Today photodynamic therapy (PDT) is administered to patients with light-emitting diode (LED) panels. These panels deliver a non-uniform light distribution on the human body parts, as the complex human anatomy is not a flat surface (head vertex, hand, shoulder, etc.). For an efficient photodynamic therapy (PDT), a light-emitting fabric (LEF) was woven from plastic optical fibers (POF) aiming at the treatment of dermatologic diseases such as actinic keratosis (AK). Plastic optical fibers (POF) (Toray, PGR-FB250) have been woven in textile in order to create macro-bendings, and thus emit out the injected light directly to the skin. The light intensity and light-emitting homogeneity of the LEF were improved thanks to Doehlert Experimental Design. During the treatment with PDT, the photosensitizers were activated in the cancerous cells. These cells may be visualized, as they show a characteristic fluorescence under UV light, which is called fluorescence diagnosis (FD). Therefore, it is proposed to modify the developed LEF for PDT to measure the fluorescence amount. For this aim, a part of POFs was cut out to observe the quantity of light that could be collected while the LEF was connected to a light source. The first prototypes showed the possibility of the illumination with the same LEF without losing the efficiency but also imaging the collected light.