Early Detection of Pressure Ulcers and Objective Assessment of Healing in Spinal Cord Injury Patients by Noninvasive Diffuse Optical Method
Abstract
People with spinal cord injuries often get pressure ulcers (bed sores). Doctors and nurses assess which patients are most likely to develop pressure ulcers by looking at the surface of skin in locations where pressure ulcers are most likely to form (near bony regions), but there is currently no method that doctors can use to look beneath the skin at the health of sub-surface tissues like fat and muscle. Researchers have shown that some pressure ulcers start to develop in sub-surface tissues; therefore a non-invasive method of assessing sub-surface tissues has the potential to be able to see pressure ulcers before they appear on the skin surface. Similarly, when patients develop open pressure injuries, it would be helpful if doctors and nurses could measure whether the pressure injury was healing or not. Currently, changes in the surface appearance of a pressure injury are used to monitor healing, but this method does not provide any information about the healing that occurs beneath the surface. Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is a non-invasive method of using laser light to quantify the movement of red blood cells through a volume of tissue. Diffuse near infrared spectroscopy (DNIRS) is a noninvasive method of using laser light to quantify the oxygenation of blood within a volume of tissue. We propose to develop and test a combined DCS/DNIRS system that uses light to quantify the movement and oxygenation of blood in sub-surface tissues at depths of up to 1 centimeter. We will test the device on 195 patients with spinal cord injury to see whether our DCS/DNIRS system can distinguish patients who will develop advanced or open pressure injuries from those who do. We will also recruit 90 patients with existing open pressure injuries from a rehabilitation hospital, and test whether information provided by our DCS/DNIRS system can predict whether a pressure injury will heal or not. If this research project is successful and our DCS/DNIRS system is able to identify deep tissue pressure injuries before they are visible on the skin surface, then aggressive treatments can be provided to prevent the injuries from growing and breaking through the skin’s surface. Further, this research could give doctors and nurses a new tool for evaluating whether a treatment for pressure injuries is working, or if the patient should try a more aggressive treatment.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 29, 2021
- Source ID
- W81XWH2010349
Entities
People
- Leonid Zubkov
Organizations
- Drexel University
- United States Army