Comparison of Laser Doppler and SIAscope for the assessment of burns
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A comparison of two non-invasive imaging modalities (Laser Doppler and SIAscope) for the assessment of burns injuries.
IRAS ID
198557
Contact name
Isabel Jones
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Burn injuries are a common presentation to A&E in the UK (175,000 per year) of who 13,000 require hospital admission. Treatment of a single burn can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and is ultimately dependent on the depth and size. Accurate evaluation of burn depth can be very difficult with the naked eye. Inaccuracy can lead to longer hospital stays, worse scarring and greater financial costs for the NHS. Currently, the “gold standard” method of assessing skin blood flow in order to help burn specialists in their assessment of burn depth is Laser Doppler Imaging (LDI). However, LDI machines can be very large and slow to collect the images, and a single imaging unit costs over GBP 50,000. Previous studies have shown that there are significant changes in skin physiology (such as temperature and pigmentation) depending on the depth of the burn. Measurement of skin pigment levels can be achieved using portable devices such as the Spectrophotometric Intracutaneous analysis scope (SIAscope) using an imagining modality called Scanoskin. The aim of this study is to determine if the scanoskin offers a comparable accuracy in burn depth assessment to the current gold standard (LDI). Scanoskin could then become the preferred imaging option.
REC name
London - Stanmore Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/0613
Date of REC Opinion
13 Jun 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion