Abstract

The noninvasive determination of the depth of severe burns is an important problem whose solution would offer medical practitioners a valuable tool for diagnosing and treating severe bums. Burned tissue is essentially a turbid medium with spatially varying dynamics: light is multiply scattered by the tissue and layers of burned tissue are distinguished by the degree of blood flow. The dynamical properties of turbid media can be probed by monitoring the temporal fluctuations of scattered light speckles. Information on a system’s dynamics is obtained from the temporal autocorrelation function of these intensity fluctuations.¹ We have recently shown that the correlation diffusion equation (CDE) accurately predicts the temporal correlation function for turbid systems with spatially varying dynamics and that the dynamical properties of such systems can be imaged using standard reconstruction algorithms.² In this contribution, we investigate the sensitivity of temporal field correlation measurements to bum thickness and the applicability of the CDE for absolute determinations of bum thickness. Using bum phantoms/ we demonstrate sensitivity to changes in the near-surface bum thickness of less than 100 μm. Furthermore, we find that simple solutions of the CDE agree well with the measurements, and should provide quantitative information about the thickness and optical properties of burns.

© 1996 Optical Society of America