It is known the disadvantages of assessing the content of advanced glycation end products (AGE) in the human body using autofluorescence of the skin. There are dependence on the skin phototypes, influence of hair, surface macrostructure and compression of biological tissues during investigation on AGE readers. On the other hand, the sclera of the eye is also composed of glycated collagen fibers and is available for in vivo fluorescence level estimation. This approach removes restrictions on the skin phototype and reduces the influence of other drawbacks. This study experimentally approves the opportunity of measuring the fluorescence of the human eye sclera in vivo for assessing the content of AGE in biological tissues. A correlation between the fluorescence of the skin of the hand and the sclera was established. The investigation of autofluorescence of the sclera and skin of the inner side of the forearm were carried out using a slit lamp. This lamp was equipped by authors with a semiconductor violet laser with a peak wavelength of 405 nm. This violet laser excites AGE fluorescence. A color camera was utilized as a photodetector. It was covered by a cutting violet light filter made of polyimide film 40 micrometer thick. The diagnostic parameter ("Sclera" or "SL skin") was the ratio of the arithmetic mean of two green pixels, one of which was exposed by violet laser, whereas another one was exposed by white light. The experiments involved 40 practically healthy subjects with ages from 18 till 70. The experimental results demonstrated an expected increase of diagnostic parameters within the age. The calculated values of the Pearson correlation coefficient between the diagnostic parameters "Sclera" / "Skin SL", "Sclera" / "Skin FL", "Skin SL" / "Skin FL" were 0.96; 0.95 and 0.99, respectively, indicating their significant statistical relationship.
Evaluation of the concentration of glycation end products (AGE) in the human body utilizing autofluorescence is widely used in medical practice. The autofluorescence level is usually measured from the skin of the hand. However, this measurement can hardly be used for some of the human skin phototypes. On the other hand, the sclera of the eye also consists of collagen fibers that can be affected by glycation. Sclera autofluorescence can also be investigated in vivo by "hand-held" fluorescence meter. In this case, there are no effects of the skin phototype and no effect of pressure made by the hand on the fluorescence meter. Therefore, the study of correlation between the fluorescence of the skin of the hand and the sclera fluorescence is in the area of practical interest. In this research the results of the simultaneous measurements of skin and sclera autofluorescence made on 34 humans are presented. The "hand-held" fluorescence meter and an upgraded slit lamp were used as instruments. The value of the Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.89, which can be considered as successful validation of using fluorescence for assessment of the AGE content in the sclera.
The diagnostic potential of advanced glycation end products (AGE) estimation by its autofluorescence is restricted by not sufficient specificity and high level of variability even in case of the same individual. One of the reasons for this restriction is melanin influence on the signal measured by diagnostic fluorescence meter, as melanin is a strong endogenous chromophore. In addition, the AGE autofluorescence is excited by ultraviolet or violet radiation, the penetration depth of which into the skin is small. In order to decrease such influence, the green LED with a peak wavelength of 530 nm was implemented. The ratio of the fluorescent radiation intensity to the product of the two intensities of the elastically scattered skin radiation was used. One of them was scattering of ultraviolet LED light with a peak wavelength of 365 nm that excited autofluorescence, the other was green LED light. This approach results in two times lower melanin influence on AGE autofluorescence.
A portable fluorescence meter with two photodetector channels was developed for risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases by in vivo measurement of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) content in the skin. One of the channels served to measure the intensity of the skin autofluorescence, and the other channel was used for normalization to the patient’s skin phototype by measuring the intensity of diffuse scattered radiation. A light-emitting diode with the peak wavelength 365 nm was used for excitation and silicon photodiodes with band filters served as photodetector assay. The AGEs measurements was performed for 70 patients with coronary heart disease and 100 practically healthy volunteers. The age grouping of patients have been used to reveal the trends in the variation of autofluorescence intensity with the factors of natural age degradation of skin collagen. It was shown that the pathologic process related to the metabolic stress directly determines the skin autofluorescence in patients with coronary heart disease.
The state of internal human homeostasis, namely the function of the internal organs - the endocrine system, the digestive tract, the nervous, hematopoietic, cardiovascular and other systems, is closely related to the skin condition. Changes in the skin biochemistry are a reflection of the internal state of the human body. Therefore, the analysis of changes in the composition of human skin various layers is one of complex parts of therapeutic disciplines. In addition to the laboratory analysis methods used today, a variety of physical methods can be successfully used to study the component composition of the human skin. Methods of Raman Spectroscopy and autofluorescence analysis can detect changes in the component composition of the skin at the molecular level. In current study we used Raman spectroscopy and autofluorescence analysis in visible and NIR regions for the analysis of human skin spectral characteristics in the presence of various influencing factors including chronic kidney transplant dysfunction.
The Raman and autofluorescence spectral characteristics of studied samples in NIR region were registered using the experimental setup, incorporated a high-resolution spectrometer with integrated cooled digital camera, a fiber-optic Raman probe and the laser module with central wavelength 785 nm. The autofluorescence human skin response in visible region was registered by portable diagnostic fluorimeter, which provide an excitation light source across the 350-400 nm range and measured light intensity within the 420-600 nm range. In this study we describe the design and results of the tests on volunteers of portable fluorescence meter based on two photodiodes. One channel of such fluorometer is used for measurement of autofluorescence intensity, another one - for intensity of elastically scattered radiation, which can be used as reference. The processing of experimental data was performed on the basis of regression analysis.
We performed the comparative research of Raman experimental data and visible autofluorescence analysis results. We estimated correlations between Raman and autofluorescence signals and also find informative Raman bands that may be used as predictors of general condition of the body. These bands lie in 1170 – 1700 cm-1 region. We demonstrated the possibility to measure melanin and lipofuscin levels in the skin, as they are the hallmarks of skin aging; and demonstrated the possibility to measure a level of advanced glycation end products in the skin, advanced glycation end products as and lipofuscins are markers of general body condition. In addition, we have found informative spectral bands characterizing changes in the component composition of the skin in the presence of various influencing factors as kidney diseases.
A diagnostic fluorimeter has been developed to estimate in vivo the content of the advanced glycation endproducts in the human skin using autofluorescence. It consists of two light-emitting diodes and implements a pulse current source for the LEDs. The LED with a peak wavelength of 365 nm is used as excitation source. Green LED with is used to obtain the information about the patient's skin phototype. The analog electronics of the fluorimeter includes two photodetector channels using silicon photodiodes. Pulse modulation of LED light made it possible to reduce the influence of sunlight and illumination on a digital signal at the output of a 10-bit ADC to a level of less than least significant bit in both channels. The digital part of the fluorimeter is based on the Arduino platform. The software controls the operating modes of the fluorimeter, provides a quantitative processing of the results, visualizes and saves the diagnostic data. Experimental studies have demonstrated the operability of the device and its noise immunity, the ability to identify agerelated changes in the skin. Nevertheless, a significant contribution to the statistical spread of the values of the diagnostic parameter is made by uncontrolled changes in the diagnosed area of the skin on the inner side of the forearm when it detaches and again touches the entrance window of the fluorimeter. The accepted normalization of the autofluorescence signal to the product of elastic skin scattering signals from the ultraviolet and green light-emitting diodes allowed to reduce the variability of the diagnostic parameter due to sunburn by a factor of 1.5.
Modern hydraulic systems should be monitored on the regular basis. One of the most effective ways to address this task
is utilizing in-line automatic particle counters (APC) built inside of the system. The measurement of particle
concentration in hydraulic liquid by APC is crucial because increasing numbers of particles should mean functional
problems. Existing automatic particle counters have significant limitation for the precise measurement of relatively low
concentration of particle in aerospace systems or they are unable to measure higher concentration in industrial ones. Both
issues can be addressed by implementation of the CMOS image sensor instead of single photodiode used in the most of
APC. CMOS image sensor helps to overcome the problem of the errors in volume measurement caused by inequality of
particle speed inside of tube. Correction is based on the determination of the particle position and parabolic velocity
distribution profile. Proposed algorithms are also suitable for reducing the errors related to the particles matches in
measurement volume. The results of simulation show that the accuracy increased up to 90 per cent and the resolution
improved ten times more compared to the single photodiode sensor.
This work presents the results of spectral analysis of biopolymer materials that are implemented in medical
sphere. Polymer samples containing polycaprolactone and iron oxides of different valence were used in the studies.
Raman spectroscopy method was used as a main control method. Relative content of iron and polycaprolactone in
studied materials was assessed using ratio of RS intensities values at 604 cm-1 and 1726 cm-1 wavenumbers to intensity
value of 1440 cm-1 line.
The work presents the results of studies of samples of human articular surface of the knee joint, obtained by Raman spectroscopy implementedduring endoprosthesis replacement surgery . The main spectral characteristics of articular surface areas with varying degrees of cartilage damage were detected at 956 cm-1, 1066 cm-1 wavenumbers, corresponding to phosphate and carbonate, and at 1660 cm-1, 1271 cm-1 wavenumbers, corresponding to amide I and amide III. Criteria allowing to identify the degree of articular hyaline cartilage damage were introduced.
KEYWORDS: Particles, Image processing, Signal processing, Sensors, Liquids, CMOS sensors, Digital signal processing, Image sensors, Digital image processing, Diagnostics
This paper describes the processing methods of signal obtained from the CMOS matrix sensor in terms of its
implementation for the in-line automatic particles counters. The methods involve an analysis of particles' tracks in terms
of its shapes and charge accumulated by each pixel. This combination gives an opportunity to determine an equivalent
diameter of particles and their shapes. These methods can be implemented using digital signal processors, which is very
important in the area of developing and producing the built into hydraulic systems sensors. The primary application of
developed methods is the diagnostic of the state of hydraulic systems in different areas.
Methods based on fluorescence and backscattering are intensively used for determination of the advanced glycation end
products (AGE) concentration in the biological tissues. There are strong correlation between the AGE concentration and
the severity of such diseases like diabetes, coronary heart disease and renal failure. This fact can be used for diagnostic
purposes in medical applications. Only few investigations in this area can be useful for development of portable and
affordable in vivo AGE meter because the most of them are oriented on using spectrometers. In this study we describe
the design and the results of tests on volunteers of portable fluorescence meter based on two photodiodes. One channel of
such fluorimeter is used for measurement of the autofluorescence (AF) intensity, another one – for the intensity of
elastically scattered radiation, which can be used as a reference. This reference channel is proposed for normalization of
the skin autofluorescence signal to the human skin photo type. The fluorimeter, that was developed is relatively compact
and does not contain any expensive optical and electronic components. The experimental results prove that proposed tool
can be used for the AGE estimation in human skin.
The results of studies of influence of oil on vegetative biological objects using Raman spectroscopy method are presented. The characteristics of Raman spectra of plants growing under the influence of oil fractions were obtained. The main changes were detected at 605 cm-1 , 840 cm-1 , 2120 cm-1 wavenumbers, which is associated with increasing concentration of bromine, aromatic carbons and methane in plant leaves.
The results of studies of effect of heavy metals (HM) on small mammals’ bone tissue using Raman spectroscopy method are presented. The characteristics of Raman spectra of small mammals’ bone tissue, living in conditions of content HM gradient, were obtained. The main changes were detected at 960 cm-1 and 1247 cm-1 wavenumbers, corresponding to phosphate and amide III. Optical criteria determining the impact of HM on bone tissue were introduced.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is usually employed for the measurement of tumor topology, which reflects structural changes of a tissue. We investigated the possibility of OCT in detecting changes using a computer texture analysis method based on Haralick texture features, fractal dimension and the complex directional field method from different tissues. These features were used to identify special spatial characteristics, which differ healthy tissue from various skin cancers in cross-section OCT images (B-scans). Speckle reduction is an important pre-processing stage for OCT image processing. In this paper, an interval type-II fuzzy anisotropic diffusion algorithm for speckle noise reduction in OCT images was used. The Haralick texture feature set includes contrast, correlation, energy, and homogeneity evaluated in different directions. A box-counting method is applied to compute fractal dimension of investigated tissues. Additionally, we used the complex directional field calculated by the local gradient methodology to increase of the assessment quality of the diagnosis method. The complex directional field (as well as the “classical” directional field) can help describe an image as set of directions. Considering to a fact that malignant tissue grows anisotropically, some principal grooves may be observed on dermoscopic images, which mean possible existence of principal directions on OCT images. Our results suggest that described texture features may provide useful information to differentiate pathological from healthy patients. The problem of recognition melanoma from nevi is decided in this work due to the big quantity of experimental data (143 OCT-images include tumors as Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), Malignant Melanoma (MM) and Nevi). We have sensitivity about 90% and specificity about 85%. Further research is warranted to determine how this approach may be used to select the regions of interest automatically.
Recently, there are great deals of skin fluorescence studies for diagnostic purposes in medicine. Measurement of the intensity of autofluorescence (AF) is suitable method for diagnostic, because it does not require traumatic procedures. Skin AF is widely used by doctors in order to assess the concentration of advanced glycation endproduct (AGE). There are no in vivo fluorescence meters made in Russia, which are affordable, portable, easy-to-use and easily replicable. This paper is devoted to study of the fluorimeter and its mathematical model of spectral characteristics that were developed by authors. Fluorimeter and its software are fully operational and they were given to doctors for testing in the real clinic conditions in order to get a set of AF statistics for patients.
Publisher's Note: This paper, originally published on 9 July 2015, was withdrawn per author request. If you have any questions, please contact SPIE Digital Library Customer Service for assistance.
Malignant skin tumors of different types were studied in vivo using optical coherence tomography (OCT), backscattering (BS), and Raman spectroscopy (RS). A multimodal method is proposed for early cancer detection based on complex analysis of OCT images by their relative alteration of scattered-radiation spectral intensities between malignant and healthy tissues. An increase in average accuracy of diagnosis was observed for a variety of cancer types (9% sensitivity, 8% specificity) by a multimodal RS-BS-OCT system in comparison with any of the three methods used separately. The proposed approach equalizes the processing rates for all methods and allows for simultaneous imaging and classification of tumors.
In this paper we consider a problem of implementing a fast algorithm for the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). EMD is one of the newest methods for decomposition of non-linear and non-stationary signals. A basis of EMD is formed "on-the-fly", i.e. it depends from a distribution of the signal and not given a priori in contrast on cases Fourier Transform (FT) or Wavelet Transform (WT). The EMD requires interpolating of local extrema sets of signal to find upper and lower envelopes. The data interpolation on an irregular lattice is a very low-performance procedure. A classical description of EMD by Huang suggests doing this through splines, i.e. through solving of a system of equations. Existence of a fast algorithm is the main advantage of the FT. A simple description of an algorithm in terms of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a standard practice to reduce operation's count. We offer a fast implementation of EMD (FEMD) through FFT and some other cost-efficient algorithms. Basic two-stage interpolation algorithm for EMD is composed of a Upscale procedure through FFT and Downscale procedure through a selection procedure for signal's points. First we consider the local maxima (or minima) set without reference to the axis OX, i.e. on a regular lattice. The Upscale through the FFT change the signal’s length to the Least Common Multiple (LCM) value of all distances between neighboring extremes on the axis OX. If the LCM value is too large then it is necessary to limit local set of extrema. In this case it is an analog of the spline interpolation. A demo for FEMD in noise reduction task for OCT has been shown.
Complex investigation of malignant tumors was performed with combined optical coherence tomography (OCT) and Raman spectroscopy (RS) setup: 22 ex vivo lung tissue samples and 23 in vivo experiments with skin tumors. It was shown that combined RS-OCT unit may be used for precise tissue morphology visualization with simultaneous tumor type determination (BCC, malignant melanoma of skin tissues, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma of lung). Fast RS phase method for skin and lung tumors identification was proposed. It is based on alteration of Raman spectral intensity in 1300-1340, 1440-1460 and 1640-1680 cm-1 bands for healthy and malignant tissue. Complex method could identify: malignant melanoma with 88.9% sensitivity and 87.8% specificity; adenocarcinoma with 100% sensitivity and 81.5% specificity; squamous cell carcinomas with 90.9% sensitivity and 77.8% specificity.
In this paper we consider the original method of solving noise reduction problem for visualization’s quality improvement of SD-OCT skin and tumors biomedical images. The principal advantages of OCT are high resolution and possibility of in vivo analysis. We propose a two-stage algorithm: 1) process of raw one-dimensional A-scans of SD-OCT and 2) remove a noise from the resulting B(C)-scans. The general mathematical methods of SD-OCT are unstable: if the noise of the CCD is 1.6% of the dynamic range then result distortions are already 25-40% of the dynamic range. We use at the first stage a resampling of A-scans and simple linear filters to reduce the amount of data and remove the noise of the CCD camera. The efficiency, improving productivity and conservation of the axial resolution when using this approach are showed. At the second stage we use an effective algorithms based on Hilbert-Huang Transform for more accurately noise peaks removal. The effectiveness of the proposed approach for visualization of malignant and benign skin tumors (melanoma, BCC etc.) and a significant improvement of SNR level for different methods of noise reduction are showed. Also in this study we consider a modification of this method depending of a specific hardware and software features of used OCT setup. The basic version does not require any hardware modifications of existing equipment. The effectiveness of proposed method for 3D visualization of tissues can simplify medical diagnosis in oncology.
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