According to the International Diabetes Federation, the problem of early diagnosis and monitoring the effectiveness of diabetes mellitus (DM) treatment is one of the most acute in modern healthcare. In 2021, there were 537M patients with DM in the world, and by 2045 this figure is to increase to 783M. DM is one of the ten deadliest diseases with a yearly mortality rate of over 6M. One of the consequences of DM is the appearance of foot tissue lesions (diabetic foot syndrome). The main factor in the pathogenesis of foot tissue lesions at DM is a violation of blood microcirculation. Recent studies have revealed that microvascular lesions in various organs, including the feet, are registered already in the first years of diabetes and even at prediabetic conditions long before the clinical manifestations of vascular complications. Therefore, increasing the effectiveness of prevention and treatment of diabetic angiopathies is possible only with timely diagnosis and correction of vascular disorders at early stages. To date, a common disadvantage of the methods available to clinicians for the diagnosis of complications of DM is the inability to noninvasively assess the degree of tissue glycation and monitor its metabolism, as well as to determine the location of the skin areas most probably exposed to the development of trophic ulcers.
In this project, utilizing emerging photonics-based technology, innovative solutions in machine learning, and definitive physiological characteristics, we introduce a diagnostic approach capable of evaluating the skin complications of diabetes mellitus at the earlier stage. The results of the feasibility studies, as well as the actual tests in patients with diabetes and healthy volunteers, clearly show the ability of the approach to differentiate the diabetic and control groups. Furthermore, the developed in-house polarization-based hyperspectral imaging technique accomplished with the implementation of the artificial neural network provides new horizons in the study and diagnosis of different diseases.
The developed hyperspectral system has shown the ability to sense alterations in blood content, blood oxygenation, and collagen structure in human skin in vivo. Proposed concept was successfully demonstrated in preclinical experiments and clinical studies and satisfied the major requirements for modern medical imaging techniques by providing high FOV, high spectral resolution, close to real-time data acquisition and processing, high level of sensitivity and specificity.
The Fellowship has successfully reached its ultimate goal of training a talented researcher, Dr Viktor Dremin, through a research project in the area of developing photonic devices for biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. According to the results of the project, 18 works were published, including 13 peer-reviewed articles, 1 book chapter and 4 conference proceedings. The results of the work were reported at 6 conferences.
