Abstract
Color vision is used throughout medicine to interpret the health and status of tissue. Ionizing radiation used in radiation therapy produces broadband white light inside tissue through the Cherenkov effect, and this light is attenuated by tissue features as it leaves the body. In this study, a novel time-gated three-channel camera was developed for the first time and was used to image color Cherenkov emission coming from patients during treatment. The spectral content was interpreted by comparison with imaging calibrated tissue phantoms. Color shades of Cherenkov emission in radiotherapy can be used to interpret tissue blood volume, oxygen saturation and major vessels within the body.
Highlights
Color vision has been perhaps the most widely used diagnostic in medicine, being part of every point-of-care examination
This work presents a novel demonstration of threechannel color imaging of Cherenkov emission, both in phantoms and in vivo during patient treatment
Presented in this work is both the prediction and verification that Cherenkov emission spectral characteristics are altered by varying tissues, and this effect manifests as perceptible color changes in a biologically relevant range of parameters
Summary
Color vision has been perhaps the most widely used diagnostic in medicine, being part of every point-of-care examination. The human eye can perceive millions of color shades[1], making it one of the best diagnostic devices that exist, and physicians take advantage of this every day. The concept of color imaging of radiotherapy dose delivery via the Cherenkov effect has been developed and demonstrated in clinical radiation therapy. The attenuation and transmission of this light through human tissues alter the perceived color signal emitted from the patient’s surface, thereby yielding biological tissue information. While Cherenkov emission has been known to exist for many decades[2,3], this is the first in-depth examination of what could be gained from multiwavelength imaging of this phenomenon in the context of radiation therapy.
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