Non-invasive Assessment of Psoriasis from Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging

Psoriasis is a chronic, immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease and affecting about 125 million people worldwide. It ranges in severity from a few scattered red, scaly plaques to involvement of almost the entire body surface. Currently, clinicians use visual and haptic methods for diagnosis the disease severity. This does not help them in stratification and risk assessment of the lesion stage and grade. In this paper, we present a new snapshot hyperspectral imaging approach to real time processing algorithms for evaluation of skin involvement. The Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) was used to calculate the difference between two reflectance spectra of healthy skin and psoriasis. The results showed that the proposed method can identify differences of uninvolved and involved psoriatic skin of a patient. In addition, we also compared spectral differences of skin from a psoriasis patient and healthy individuals, which could be valuable in characterization and mapping psoriasis. In conclusion, the non-invasive and snapshot hyperspectral imaging method described in this study sheds light on its clinical application in patients with psoriasis further confirmatory studies are still needed to validate this assessment tool.