Effects of Different Types of Burn Wounds and its Dressings on Millimeter-Wave Images

Millimeter-wave imaging is a promising technology for diagnosing skin burns, that may make it easier to assess and determine the burn depth in the near future. However, up to now, it has not yet been brought to clinical use due to the lack of clinical trails on patients and a millimeter-wave-aided classification of skin burns. In this paper, in a preliminary step, ex-vivo burned porcine skin is utilized to visualize and quantify skin that has been burned in different ways, and to access its effect on millimeter-wave images. For the first time, a 24 hour study of in-vivo human skin visualizes the effect of wound dressings using a fast imaging system operating at frequencies from 70 to 80 GHz. For validation, the effective relative permittivity of the skin and the dressings are measured using a open-ended coaxial probe. An analytical model is applied to calculate the reflection coefficient which are compared to the intensity of the millimeter-wave images to validate the model.