|
Burn wounds are often characterized by injury depth, which then dictates wound management strategy. While most
superficial burns and full thickness burns can be diagnosed through visual inspection, clinicians experience difficulty
with accurate diagnosis of burns that fall between these extremes. Accurately diagnosing burn severity in a timely
manner is critical for starting the appropriate treatment plan at the earliest time points to improve patient outcomes. To
address this challenge, research groups have studied the use of commercial laser Doppler imaging (LDI) systems to
provide objective characterization of burn-wound severity. Despite initial promising findings, LDI systems are not
commonplace in part due to long acquisition times that can suffer from artifacts in moving patients. Commercial LDI
systems are being phased out in favor of laser speckle imaging (LSI) systems that can provide similar information with
faster acquisition speeds. To better understand the accuracy and usefulness of commercial LSI systems in burn-oriented
research, we studied the performance of a commercial LSI system in three different sample systems and compared its
results to a research-grade LSI system in the same environments. The first sample system involved laboratory
measurements of intralipid (1%) flowing through a tissue simulating phantom, the second preclinical measurements in a
controlled burn study in which wounds of graded severity were created on a Yorkshire pig, and the third clinical
measurements involving a small sample of clinical patients. In addition to the commercial LSI system, a research grade
LSI system that was designed and fabricated in our labs was used to quantitatively compare the performance of both
systems and also to better understand the “Perfusion Unit” output of commercial systems.
|
