Noninvasive Spectral Monitoring for Radiation Therapy Induced Skin-Inflammation

Toward high-quality radiotherapy treatment for skin cancer, skin toxicity necessitates precise monitoring. The monitoring procedure targets the investigation of the development of acute skin toxicity due to radiation exposure. Skin toxicity is a common symptom in 90% of the patients who receive ionizing radiation for cancer treatment. This work presents an investigation of using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to quantify skin toxicity inflammatory response (skin erythema). This investigation used expert visual assessment (VA), optical imaging, and HSI to monitor skin erythema induced in 5 recruited skin cancer patients referred to radiotherapy for treatment. Erythema indices were computed using Dawson’s formulae that were applied to the captured data via HSI and the results were compared to VA. The study’s results showed that the computed relative erythema index is a highly correlated objective measure to VA. In addition, this study provided a piece of evidence that hyperspectral imaging beats optical imaging in classifying skin erythema in terms of precision and specificity. Consequently, HSI becomes a potential opportunity for investigating the toxicity symptoms of skin toxicity due to a variety of dermatological diseases.