Tissue-Equivalent Phantoms Recognition Employing Hyperspectral Imaging

Abstract

The incessant innovations, of hyperspectral imaging (HSI), and data mining algorithms, express the necessity for developing reliable assessment and comparison means.In medical applications of HSI, for instance, one of the means of assessment is tissueequivalent phantoms.These phantoms are designed to mimic the spectral behavior of the real living tissues.In this work, gel-based-phantoms are prepared with altered ingredients.The gel phantom's ingredients include India ink, and Intralipid to provide absorption and scattering respectively.Unlike visual assessment, and photography, HSI for succeeded to identify the various phantoms based on its spectral signature.In conclusion, we introduce a simple method to evaluate the performance of newly developed optical imaging techniques including HSI via an affordable, inexpensive, and easy to make phantoms. 1-IntroductionUntil then, skin diseases diagnosis and treatment evaluation are inspected by visual assessment, the gold standard [1], [2], via a dermatologist [3], [4].However, visual assessment was criticized in many studies to be subjective, qualitative, temporally inconsistent, and invasive [5]-[10].To overcome the critiques of visual assessment, objective techniques were proposed for precise skin inspection/ treatment assessment.The proposed objective techniques, in literature, include optical [11], and non-optical techniques [12].In optical techniques, there are two main approaches for skin assessment; one of which is based on diffuse reflectance spectroscopic (DRS) measurements while the other is based on color imaging.The spectroscopic-basedapproach is well-known for detecting the spectral signature of the skin's symptoms by high precision, inexpensive equipment [4].Hence, it aids the dermatologist in differentiating between visibly alike skin's symptoms.Unfortunately, spectroscopic measurements techniques need direct skin contact; which is hard to achieve in cases including burns, and limited to a small area of inspection; therefore, it takes lengthy time, and effort to judge a sizeable region of interest (ROI).Color imaging/ photography, unlike spectroscopic measurements, is contactless and deals with a sizable ROI.Nonetheless,