Today, if doctors really want to see if a wound is healing they will need to do a biopsy or some other invasive technique that may further injure an already injured patient in order to find detailed information on a small area of the wound.
However, a technology called “Hyperspectral Imaging” offers doctors a noninvasive, painless way to discriminate between healthy and diseased tissue and also tells the doctor how well the damaged tissue is healing over a wide area. The catch is that there is still a lack of calibration standards available which is impeding using Hyperspectral Imaging.
Consumer digital cameras and the human eye can only see red, green, and blue light which is a relatively narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, while hyperspectral Imaging is able to capture information for hundreds of narrow spectral bands from ultraviolet to the infrared.
According to NIST www.nist.gov researcher David Allen, being sensitive to so many wavelengths means that hyperspectral imagers can see many different things that humans can’t see, including the amount of oxygen in human tissues which is an indicator of healing.
Catherine Cooksey, the project leader for the spectrophotometry program reports, “We need to know what diseased tissue looks like hyperspectrally and what so called normal tissue looks like. After enough data is collected, the researchers will feed it into NIST’s Hyperspectral Image Projector, a device that will show tissue in various stages of repair. Medical imaging technicians can then use these digital tissue phantoms to test their imager’s ability to detect different tissue types and conditions.
NIST has accomplished a non-human trial. At this point, NIST researchers will be able to gather data on how human skin looks under various wavelengths of light in order to develop the badly needed standards.