Pre-Clinical Demonstration of a Rapid and Non-Contact Method to Quantify Burn Injury Using Attenuation of the Optical Coherence Tomography Signal

A porcine burn model was used to demonstrate the potential of using the attenuation of the optical coherence tomography signal as an indicator of the degree of burn injury.A swept-source optical coherence tomography system amenable to operating in burn trauma centers and in surgeries was designed and built in-house.A special design feature of our optical coherence tomography system is its large stand-off distance (272 mm) between the data collecting lens terminating the sample arm and the sample surface.This feature eliminates potential contact between patient and instrument, and thereby decreases the potential for infection through remote contamination.Four contact burn types, histologically confirmed to produce superficial, superficial-intermediate, deeper-intermediate and full thickness injuries, were investigated.Burn types and matching control sites were randomly placed over a predetermined grid.The burn injuries were restricted to under 1% of the total body surface area in order to minimize systemic effects and eliminate cross-talk between the measurement sites on the grid.At each grid location, the data was acquired very fast, amounting to total acquisition times of less than 3 seconds per data set, speeds practical for use in the high-stress environment characterizing burn trauma units.We used attenuation coefficients of optical coherence tomography signal in tissue as a summary parameter for burn injury determination.This simple parameter can be computed in real-time during the OCT acquisition sequence across the burn wound providing the clinician a real-time assessment of the degree of injury.