Assessment of human burn scars with optical coherence tomography by imaging the attenuation coefficient of tissue after vascular masking

Abstract. The formation of burn-scar tissue in human skin profoundly alters, among other things, the structure of the dermis. We present a method to characterize dermal scar tissue by the measurement of the near-infrared attenuation coefficient using optical coherence tomography (OCT). To generate accurate en face parametric images of attenuation, we found it critical to first identify (using speckle decorrelation) and mask the tissue vasculature from the three-dimensional OCT data. The resulting attenuation coefficients in the vasculature-masked regions of the dermis of human burn-scar patients are lower in hypertrophic (3.8±0.4  mm−1) and normotrophic (4.2±0.9  mm−1) scars than in contralateral or adjacent normal skin (6.3±0.5  mm−1). Our results suggest that the attenuation coefficient of vasculature-masked tissue could be used as an objective means to assess human burn scars.

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