Can color inhomogeneity of bruises be used to establish their age?

Abstract

Bruises become spatially inhomogeneous during the healing process; a smaller red-blue core area, caused by hemoglobin, is surrounded by a larger yellow area, caused by bilirubin, which is enzymatically formed from hemoglobin. These two areas develop at different rates and hence carry information about the age of the bruise. We present a proof of principle demonstration that the age of bruises can be determined via an inverse procedure using a mathematical model and daily measurements of these two areas using a hyperspectral imaging system. The inaccuracy found is 2.3% for fresh bruises and 3 to 24% for bruises up to 3 days old. In conclusion, color inhomogeneity of bruises can be used to determine their age. We expect that future age determination of bruises by the inverse procedure described here, possibly also including the distribution of concentrations in the areas will open up a new phase in clinical bruise classification.

Automatic method for the dermatological diagnosis of selected hand skin features in hyperspectral imaging

“…In [13], there are also other results of analysis which is related only to the analysis of the whole ROI (region of interest) marked manually by an operator. The use of hyperspectral imaging to assess the time of the bruise formation is also interesting – Stam [25]. The inaccuracy found is 2.3% for fresh bruises and 3 to 24% for bruises up to 3 days old.…”

Proceedings of the International Forensic Radiology Research Summit May 10–11, 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“…Similarly, various types of optical spectroscopy in scene investigation of latent and dried blood spots (Edelman, van Leeuwen, & Aalders, 2015;Laan, Bremmer, Aalders, & de Bruin, 2014) and bruising are published for forensic investigations (Edelman, Gaston, van Leeuwen, Cullen, & Aalders, 2012;Stam, et al, 2011). Defining the correlation between radiology and pathology findings such as developing methods of effectively displaying multimodal imaging or synthesizing multimodal results for presentation in court and to victims' families have reported benefit (Ruder et al, 2014).…”

Hyperspectral imaging for non-contact analysis of forensic traces

“…They used minimum noise fraction transform, a statistical method similar to PCA, to classify the injuries. Stam et al described how HSI can be used to accurately determine the areas covered by hemoglobin and bilirubin in the bruise, by fitting pixel spectra with a combination of reference spectra of chromophores present in bruises [47].…”