Link Skin Morphology and Vasculature with Diseases using Optical Imaging

ended

According the the Global Study of Diseases 2017, skin and subcutaneous diseases have increased rapidly in the past decade measured by the disability adjusted life years. However, there is still a lack of knowledge in many of these diseases, and the need for a novel method to study, diagnose and treat skin disease is ever-increasing. The current diagnostic tools, such as dermoscopy and biopsy, are either not sensitive enough or very invasive and time-consuming. Knowing that skin and subcutaneous diseases alter the cutaneous vasculature, SkinOptima proposes to use a multi-modal optical imaging method to extract the complete human cutaneous blood vessels in a non-invasive and in vivo manner. Then, the blood vessel network will be quantified in different perspectives. Using quantitative analysis of the vascular parameters, a link between three major skin diseases and their unique vascular patterns can be established. A lesion area determination algorithm will also be developed to help the dermatologists prepare skin cancer removal surgeries and monitor the treatment efficacy. This multi-modal approach involves two optical imaging modalities - optical coherence tomography (OCT) and photoacoustic tomography (PAT). OCT alone can extract tissue morphology for about 1 mm in skin. A functional extension of OCT, called OCT angiography (OCTA) is capable to extract the micro-vessels in the first millimeter in skin. PAT, on the other hand, can image skin blood vessels with a coarser resolution from 1 mm down to 5 mm below the skin surface. An imaging probe will be designed to combine these two modalities for patient imaging. To develop all the vessel extraction and vessel quantification algorithms, several types of skin phantoms will be 3D printed. In the end, about 150 patients will be imaged by the multi-modal system and the link between vasculature and diseases such as basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and dermatitis will be established.