Citation

Srinivas SM, de Boer JF, Park H, Keikhanzadeh K, Huang HE, Zhang J, Jung WQ, Chen Z, Nelson JS. J. Biomed. Opt. 2004; 9(1): 207-212.

Affiliation

Beckman Laser Institute, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Surgery, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92612, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, International Society for Optical Engineering)

DOI

10.1117/1.1629680

PMID

14715075

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.

Language: en