Non-invasive Photoacoustic Imaging of Skin Inflammatory Disorders With Machine Learning-assisted Scoring

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

Inflammatory skin diseases are increasingly common in various industrialized western societies. In 2015, eczema or dermatitis, the most common inflammatory skin disease, is estimated to have affected 245 million people worldwide. In fact, the biggest percentage of cases seen in National Skin Centre ...

Inflammatory skin diseases are increasingly common in various industrialized western societies. In 2015, eczema or dermatitis, the most common inflammatory skin disease, is estimated to have affected 245 million people worldwide. In fact, the biggest percentage of cases seen in National Skin Centre (NSC), Singapore is for dermatitis (34.1%) while other inflammatory skin diseases such as contact dermatitis and psoriasis account for 4.7% and 3.3% of the cases respectively. Inflammatory skin diseases can cause remodeling of the vasculature. This vascular remodeling is brought about by the imbalance between pro- and anti-angiogenic mediators under conditions of chronic inflammation, resulting in either vessel growth or recession. Vascular remodeling of affected skin usually display vascular enlargement during inflammation. In psoriasis, for example, the skin capillaries expand and become tortuous, making the lesions appear red due to the thinned epithelium. Emerging evidence reports that chronic inflammatory skin diseases are closely related to systemic complications such as atherosclerosis, type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome due to systemic inflammation. One possible theory linking cutaneous and systemic vascular diseases is from the release of products such as inflammatory cytokines produced in affected skin lesions into the systemic circulation, resulting in the increased risk of inflammation in other organs or tissues. It was reported that individuals with Atopic Dermatitis (AD) in the adult US population tend to have a self-reported history of hypertension and adult-onset diabetes even with control of body mass index and other comorbidities. An analysis of different studies indicated that both individuals from Asia and North America with pediatric and adult-onset of AD have a higher chance of being overweight, which can lead to other metabolic diseases. It was also reported that there is an increased number of inflammatory cells around vessels seen in histopathology biopsies of the human forearm skin for diabetic patients compared to non-diabetic populations. The density of vascular network also tended to be higher in diabetic patients in the forearms compared to non-diabetic subjects. However, no difference in vascular networks were observed between subjects with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The mechanism to explain the increased vessel density in diabetic subjects is not known, though inflammation plays a role due to the presence of inflammatory cells. Since inflammatory skin diseases are systemic disorders due to the co-morbidities, it would shed light on the understanding of these diseases and their linkages to metabolic disease such as diabetes.

Tracking Information