Early detection and diagnosis is a must in secondary prevention of melanoma and other cancerous lesions of the skin. In this work, we present an online, reservoir-based, non-parametric estimation and classification model that allows for this functionality on pigmented lesions, such that detection thresholding can be tuned to maximize accuracy and/or minimize overall false negative rates. This system has been tested in a dataset consisting of 116 patients and a total of 124 hyperspectral images of nevi, raised nevi and melanomas, detecting up to 100% of the suspicious lesions at the expense of some false positives.

Prototyping hyperspectral imaging devices in current biomedical optics research requires taking into consideration various issues regarding optics, imaging, and instrumentation. In summary, an ideal imaging system should only be limited by exposure time, but there will be technological limitations (e.g., actuator delay and backlash, network delays, or embedded CPU speed) that should be considered, modeled, and optimized. This can be achieved by constructing a multiparametric model for the imaging system in question. The article describes a rotating-mirror scanning hyperspectral imaging device, its multiparametric model, as well as design and calibration protocols used to achieve its optimal performance. The main objective of the manuscript is to describe the device and review this imaging modality, while showcasing technical caveats, models and benchmarks, in an attempt to simplify and standardize specifications, as well as to incentivize prototyping similar future designs.

Abstract-In Breast Conserving Therapy, surgeons measure the thickness of healthy tissue surrounding an excised tumor (surgical margin) via post-operative histological or visual assessment tests that, for lack of enough standardization and reliability, have recurrence rates in the order of 33%. Spectroscopic interrogation of these margins is possible during surgery, but algorithms are needed for parametric or dimension reduction processing. One methodology for tumor discrimination based on dimensionality reduction and nonparametric estimation -in particular, Directional Kernel Density Estimation -is proposed and tested on spectral image data from breast samples. Once a hyperspectral image of the tumor has been captured, a surgeon assists by establishing Regions of Interest where tissues are qualitatively differentiable. After proper normalization, Directional KDE is used to estimate the likelihood of every pixel in the image belonging to each specified tissue class. This information is enough to yield, in almost real time and with 98% accuracy, results that coincide with those provided by histological H&E validation performed after the surgery.

Many well-known algorithms for the color enhancement of hyperspectral measurements in biomedical imaging are based on statistical assumptions that vary greatly with respect to the proportions of different pixels that appear in a given image, and thus may thwart their application in a surgical environment. This article attempts to explain why this occurs with SVD-based enhancement methods, and proposes the separation of spectral enhancement from analysis. The resulting method, termed affinity-based color enhancement, or ACE for short, achieves multi-and hyperspectral image coloring and contrast based on current spectral affinity metrics that can physically relate spectral data to a particular biomarker. This produces tunable, real-time results which are analogous to the current state-of-the-art algorithms, without suffering any of their inherent context-dependent limitations. Two applications of this method are shown as application examples: vein contrast enhancement and high-precision chromophore concentration estimation.