Differentiation of burn wounds in an in vivo porcine model using terahertz spectroscopy

The accuracy of current burn triage techniques has remained between 50-70%. Accordingly, there is a significant clinical need for the quantitative and accurate assessment of partial-thickness burn injuries. Porcine skin represents the closest animal model to human skin, and is often used in surgical skin grafting procedures. In this study, we used a standardized in vivo porcine burn model to obtain terahertz (THz) point-spectroscopy measurements from burns with various severities. We then extracted two reflection hyperspectral parameters, namely spectral area under the curve between approximately 0.1 and 0.9 THz (..10 dB bandwidth in each spectrum), and spectral slope, to characterize each burn. Using a linear combination of these two parameters, we accurately classified deep partial- and superficial partial-thickness burns (p = 0.0159), compared to vimentin immunohistochemistry as the gold standard for burn depth determination.