Radiation Therapy Induced-Erythema: Comparison of Spectroscopic Diffuse Reflectance Measurements and Visual Assessment

摘要

Surveillance and assessment of radiation-induced erythema is an important aspect of managing skin toxicity inradiation therapy treated patients. Upon receiving the early fractions of radiation, an inflammatory response andvascular dilation takes place due to damage of basal cells in the skin's epidermal layer. This process of skin reddeningknown as erythema. The gold standard used for assessing and grading erythema is visual assessment (VA) by anexperienced clinician/ radiotherapist using toxicity scoring tools. This method is limited by the assessor's experience,vision acuity, and the subjectivity of qualitative scores. An alternative optical technique to VA, is diffuse reflectancespectroscopy (DRS). A comparison between both techniques performance in detecting radiation therapy-inducederythema is demonstrated in this pilot study. The results evidenced that DRS is capable of detecting skin erythemabefore an expert eye could do so.