Pressure Injuries are a major concern in medicine, yet their origins and pathologies are relatively unknown. The origins of these issues are continually studied but they are relatively unknown and cost the healthcare industry millions of dollars each year. Low-cost alternatives include optical techniques, which have previously been used to study tissue sample compositions and flow rates. One of the most common of these techniques is Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) which uses a probe and light source to observe the reflectance of the tissue. DRS is good at exploring relative changes in tissue composition between two sites. Although pressure injuries have been studied previously, this study hypothesizes that pressure injuries that result from the presence of foreign mechanical devices like those seen in patients with Hydrocephalus can be observed by an optical device like DRS. This study was conducted on pediatric patients with subdural cranial shunts, some of whom experienced pain at the shunt site, by analyzing the photons that are returned to the probe over a period of time and determining the composition of the blood and tissue beneath the surface. Data was analyzed through a processing algorithm in MATLAB that allowed for the comparison of the relative difference within individual patients. These patients were then grouped into those with and without pain and further analysis will be done to compare the two populations. The data has notable signatures for hemoglobin and melanin, but the results of this study are still inconclusive as the data has not been completely analyzed and divided into smaller groups that can be compared in a robust statistical analysis.
Authors: Andrew Peachman and Boyd Colbrunn
Faculty Advisor: Karthik Vishwanath, Physics
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