Diagnostic imaging of burn wounds using a handheld polarization-sensitive terahertz spectral scanner: reports from the first clinical study (Conference Presentation)

While traditional methods of burn wound diagnosis are known to be inaccurate, no technological method has been able to replace them as the gold-standard of care. Recently, we demonstrated that terahertz (THz) spectroscopic imaging using our THz Portable Handheld Spectral Reflection (PHASR) Scanners can predict healing outcome and assess wound severity with high accuracy in in vivo porcine models. We have developed physics-based models for classification, such as training a support vector machine on the wavelet packet Shannon entropy for each spectrum. This method achieved a classification accuracy of 94.7% to determine if the burn would re-epithelialize within 28 days. However, until now THz imaging has yet to be applied to in vivo burn assessment of human patients. Here, we will present the first use of the THz PHASR Scanner in a clinical setting and present preliminary analysis of polarimetric THz measurements of human burn wounds.