Files and links (1)
PDFOpen Access (License Unspecified), Open Access
Dissertation
Evaluation of chronic wounds by Raman spectroscopy and image processing
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
Mar 2012
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/etd-3802
Abstract
Diabetic foot ulcer has become a major healthcare problem as the prevalence of diabetes and the related complications increase globally. Due to the underlying pathological abnormalities in diabetic patients, these ulcers do not heal in a timely and orderly fashion as acute wounds do. Objective and accurate assessment of wound healing status is needed to deliver better wound care to patients. In this research, we utilize near-infrared Raman spectroscopy to study tissue samples from diabetic foot ulcers on a small cohort of patients. We categorized wounds as healing or non-healing, harvested samples from wound debridement and collected Raman spectra from cryosectioned samples. The average spectrum of samples from healing wounds shows higher intensities at bands associated with collagen and other proteins while the non-healing group shows higher intensities at bands associated with red blood cells. Significant spectral features such as individual band intensities and pairwise intensity ratios were identified by performing unpaired t-tests between these two groups. Supervised classification using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier was conducted to classify the spectra or samples based on the spectral features. The trained SVM classifier is able to predict a spectrum's category with 85.2% accuracy. The prediction of whether a sample is from a healing or non-healing wound can be as accurate as 95.7% when the average spectrum of the sample was fed to the SVM classifier. Since the quantification of the wound area is a common clinical practice, we also applied image processing techniques to accurately detect the wound boundary in digital images of the wound. Our method derives from a combination of color based image analysis algorithms, and the method is validated by comparing the performance with manually traced boundaries of wounds in animal models and human wounds of diverse patients. Images were taken by an inexpensive digital camera under variable lighting conditions. Approximately 100 patient images and 50 animal images were analyzed and high overlap was achieved between manual tracings and calculated wound areas by our method. The simplicity of our method combined with its robustness suggests that it can be a valuable tool in clinical wound evaluations.
Metrics
62 File views/ downloads
25 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Evaluation of chronic wounds by Raman spectroscopy and image processing
- Creators
- Xiang Mao - DU
- Contributors
- Ahmet Sacan (Advisor) - Drexel University (1970-)Elisabeth S. Papazoglou (Advisor) - Drexel University (1970-)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems (1997-2026); Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 3802; 991014632719904721