Principles And Clinical Applications Of Superficial Skin Imaging In Disease Diagnosis And Therapeutic Assessment

Skin tissue is not only the largest organ,but also one of the most important organs of the human body.When the human is in a healthy state,the optical and thermal pa-rameters of the tissues(including skin tissue),such as absorption coefficient,scattering coefficient,surface temperature,etc.,are within a normal fluctuation range;but when the body suffers from skin diseases as Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus,the blood flow or cell metabolism of the diseased skin tissue will change,resulting in abnormalities in the op-tical parameters of the skin tissue,which exceeds the normal range.In addition to skin diseases,the diseases like pneumonia,though the unhealthy tissue is inside the human body,will cause abnormal changes in the skin temperature through the heat conduction and convection,revealing that the surface temperature changes of the skin tissue also reflect the health status of internal human body.Therefore,the use of optical and ther-mal imaging technology on the surface of skin can realize the diagnosis of a variety of diseases,and these detection methods are non-invasive,safe to the human body,and have great clinical application potentials.The main research contents of this paper are as follows:(1)In view of the lack of effective imaging detection methods in the current clinical diagnosis of Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus,the optical imaging technology is proposed to diagnose Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus.Regarding this,two parts are included.The first one is to quantify the level of skin tissue fiber disorder by polarized light imaging technology for in-vivo diagnosis of Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus,and the second part is to measure skin tissue melanin and blood oxygen content by hyperspectral imaging technology to perform in-vivo diagnosis of Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus.We found that the disorder level of collagen fiber alignment in Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus tissues was higher than normal vulvar tissues.However,the melanin index and tissue oxygen saturation index of Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus tissues were lower than normal vulvar tissues.(2)In view of the lack of imaging methods for timely and objective evaluation of the therapeutic effect of high-intensity focused ultrasound in the treatment of Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus,optical and thermal imaging techniques are used to timely evaluate the therapeutic effect of high-intensity focused ultrasound.Based on the biological effects of high-intensity focused ultrasound treatment on Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus tissue,the hyperspectral imaging technology and infrared thermal imaging technology are utilized to compare the reflection spectrum and thermal relaxation time of the tissue before and after the treatment for therapeutic assessment of high-intensity focused ultrasound for Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus.(3)Infrared thermal imaging technology is employed to assess physiological func-tions through high-resolution temperature measurement to realize in-vivo diagnosis and disease course monitoring of patients with pneumonia.Therefore,a new portable low-cost infrared thermal imaging camera is used to study the temperature field distribution of the back skin of normal people,patients with pneumonia and fever patients with-out pneumonia,and analyze the influence of interfering factors,such as age,gender,height,and weight,to achieve rapid auxiliary diagnosis and disease course monitor-ing for patients with pneumonia.We investigated and found that due to lung infection,the temperature of the lung mapping area on the back of patients with pneumonia has increased.(4)Aiming at the quantification of fiber arrangement quality,a homogenization fac-tor based on limit information entropy is proposed,and the method is proved by theories that the homogenization index is almost independent of the total number of samples(that is,it is almost irrelevant to the system resolution).The comparison between homoge-nization index and other methods proposed by several other recent literature through simulated data experiments is given,pointing out the superiority of the homogenization factor.In this study,the skin optical and thermal imaging methods are applied in diagnos-ing Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus and pneumonia,respectively,demonstrating the viability of application of using skin imaging methods to detect skin diseases or pneumonia,by which the abnormal skin temperature distribution is induced,and provide an auxiliary diagnosis methods for practitioners.