Spectral assessment of radiation therapy-induced skin erythema

Abstract

Toward objective assessment of skin erythema, diverse approaches were in a contest. Yet, spectral measurement techniques are discriminated by identifying the distinct states of skin health with a unique signature. In this work, we selected two spectral techniques for the assessment of erythema induced by radiation therapy of skin cancer. The selected techniques are diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) measurements and hyperspectral imaging (HSI). The purpose of this work is to evaluate the performance of DRS and HSI compared with the visual assessment (VA) technique. VA is the gold standard for erythema assessment. For evaluation purposes, erythema indices were computed for both spectral techniques. Next, Pearson correlation was computed relative to VA scores. The results showed that HSI had a higher correlation with VA rather than DRS technique. In sum, the DRS technique suffers from the limited region of measurements and being in contact with the skin which is not the case with HSI.