Open AccessMeasurements of the thermal coefficient of optical attenuation at different depth regions of in vivo human skins using optical coherence tomography: a pilot study
Author(s) -
Ya Su,
X. Steve Yao,
Zhihong Li,
Zhuo Meng,
Tiegen Liu,
Longzhi Wang
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
biomedical optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.362
H-Index - 86
ISSN - 2156-7085
DOI - 10.1364/boe.6.000500
Subject(s) - attenuation coefficient , optical coherence tomography , attenuation , materials science , optics , biomedical engineering , correlation coefficient , dermis , thermal , physics , anatomy , computer science , medicine , machine learning , meteorology
We present detailed measurement results of optical attenuation's thermal coefficients (referenced to the temperature of the skin surface) in different depth regions of in vivo human forearm skins using optical coherence tomography (OCT). We first design a temperature control module with an integrated optical probe to precisely control the surface temperature of a section of human skin. We propose a method of using the correlation map to identify regions in the skin having strong correlations with the surface temperature of the skin and find that the attenuation coefficient in these regions closely follows the variation of the surface temperature without any hysteresis. We observe a negative thermal coefficient of attenuation in the epidermis. While in dermis, the slope signs of the thermal coefficient of attenuation are different at different depth regions for a particular subject, however, the depth regions with a positive (or negative) slope are different in different subjects. We further find that the magnitude of the thermal coefficient of attenuation coefficient is greater in epidermis than in dermis. We believe the knowledge of such thermal properties of skins is important for several noninvasive diagnostic applications, such as OCT glucose monitoring, and the method demonstrated in this paper is effective in studying the optical and biological properties in different regions of skin.