Intraoperative hyperspectral determination of human tissue properties.

Florian Cornelius Uecker,Anna Hilsmann,Eric Larry Wisotzky,Steffen Dommerich,Peter Eisert,Philipp Arens

doi:10.1117/1.jbo.23.9.091409

Abstract

We address the automatic differentiation of human tissue using multispectral imaging with promising potential for automatic visualization during surgery. Currently, tissue types have to be continuously differentiated based on the surgeon's knowledge only. Further, automatic methods based on optical in vivo properties of human tissue do not yet exist, as these properties have not been sufficiently examined. To overcome this, we developed a hyperspectral camera setup to monitor the different optical behavior of tissue types in vivo. The aim of this work is to collect and analyze these behaviors to open up optical opportunities during surgery. Our setup uses a digital camera and several bandpass filters in front of the light source to illuminate different tissue types with 16 specific wavelength ranges. We analyzed the different intensities of eight healthy tissue types over the visible spectrum (400 to 700nm). Using our setup and sophisticated postprocessing in order to handle motion during capturing, we are able to find tissue characteristics not visible for the human eye to differentiate tissue types in the 16-dimensional wavelength domain. Our analysis shows that this approach has the potential to support the surgeon's decisions during treatment.

Highlights

During surgery, a surgeon has to remove pathological lesions, replace abnormal tissue, or reconnect or repair damaged tissue structures, all of this while healthy tissue areas have to be maintained and organs at risk have to stay completely untreated and healthy
In order to support the surgeon’s decision by detecting optical tissue characteristics not visible for human eye, we developed and investigated a hyperspectral method for analysis of in vivo tissue characteristics of different tissue types
We have investigated eight different tissue types, which are scanned in three different surgical procedures

Summary

Introduction

A surgeon has to remove pathological lesions, replace abnormal tissue, or reconnect or repair damaged tissue structures, all of this while healthy tissue areas have to be maintained and organs at risk have to stay completely untreated and healthy. In order to accomplish this objective, to remove pathological while saving healthy tissue, the surgeon has to differentiate between healthy tissue areas and abnormal or damaged tissue. This manual differentiation process is very complex as the visual occurrence of living tissue, whether healthy or abnormal, often shows no significant optical differences under white light illumination. Pathological structures mainly develop between or in the direct proximity to important structures and have most fine extensions These facts make it hard to distinguish pathological from healthy tissue and, as a consequence, the structure exposition process is of high risk and a significant degree of difficulty, because damage to healthy structures can cause a temporary or permanent loss of functionality of the affected region. Since tissue structures are very hard to separate using optical and haptic qualities, this

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