Determination of burn depth by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Abstract

An assessment of burn depth is a key step in guiding the treatment of patients who have sustained thermal injuries. Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) might eventually provide the physician with a quantitative estimate of actual burn depth. Burns of various depths were induced by contacting rat skin with a brass rod preheated to 75 degrees C for 5, 15, or 30 s. Thermal injury denatured the collagen in the skin, and PS-OCT imaged the resulting reduction of birefringence through the depth-resolved changes in the polarization state of light propagated and reflected from the sample. Stokes vectors were calculated for each point in the PS-OCT images and the reduction in the rate of phase retardation between two orthogonal polarizations of light (deg/microm) was found to show a consistent trend with burn exposure time. PS-OCT is a noninvasive technique with potential to give the physician the information needed to formulate an optimal treatment plan for burn patients.

Depth-encoded all-fiber swept source polarization sensitive OCT

“…For example, loss of RNFL birefringence is observed during early stages of glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness in the developed world [8,9]. PS-OCT has found many applications, including anterior [10][11][12][13] and posterior eye imaging [13][14][15][16], skin imaging [17][18][19][20], burn depth and thermal damage assessment [21][22][23][24], dental imaging [25,26] and atherosclerotic plaque characterization [27][28][29].…”

Dermoscopy guided dark-field multi-functional optical coherence tomography

“…Polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) provides polarization properties of tissues such as birefringence, and it is useful for distinguishing lesions from normal tissues if the normal ones have polarization properties. PS-OCT has been applied to studying various organs including the skin [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Angiographic OCT based on flow characteristics provides additional vascular information within tissue, such as diameter, shape and distribution of blood vessels and their perfusion.…”

Single camera spectral domain polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography using offset B-scan modulation

“…Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PSOCT) [3][4][5] enables polarization-dependent detection in OCT and can provide additional imaging contrast such as retardance and fast-axis orientation in birefringence samples. PSOCT has been successfully applied in a variety of biomedical applications such as burn depth estimation in skin [6,7] and ophthalmology [8][9][10]. The recent development of PSOCT has been shifted to spectral domain implementation [11][12][13][14]11,15] due to its superior speed and sensitivity that are critical for in vivo three dimensional applications.…”