Publication Date
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Ping He (Committee Member), Ulas Sunar (Committee Chair), Jeffrey Travers (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering (MSBME)
Abstract
Burn injuries such as thermal burns, which are caused by contact with flames, hot liquids, hot surfaces, and other sources of high heat as well as chemical burns and electrical burns, affects at least 500,000 people in the United States, to which 45,000 of them require medical treatment and 3,500 of them result in death. It has also been reported that in the United States alone, fire results in a death approximately every three hours and an injury every 33 minutes. Early knowledge about burn severity can lead to improved outcome for patients. In this study, the changes in optical properties in human skin following thermal burn injuries were investigated. Human skin removed during body contouring procedures was burned for either 10 or 60 seconds using a metal block placed in boiling water. Multi-wavelength spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) measurements were performed on each sample and the optical properties (absorption and scattering parameters) were obtained at each wavelength. Multi-wavelength fitting was used to quantify scattering parameters, and these parameters were compared to histologic assessments of burn severity. Our results indicate substantial changes in optical parameters and changes, which correlate well with respect to burn severity. This study shows the characterization of thermal burn injury on human skin ex vivo by using the optical method of SFDI with high sensitivity and specificity. Due to more challenging conditions of layered skin structures with differing thickness in humans, ongoing work tackles combining high-resolution ultrasound imaging with SFDI for more accurate quantification of optical properties during in vivo clinical studies.
Page Count
91
Department or Program
Department of Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2016
Copyright
Copyright 2016, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may be modified only if the modified version is distributed with these same permissions. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
