Non-Radiological Imaging Devices for Combat Casualty Care Associated with Burn

Farus, LLC proposes to develop a novel burn assessment tool based upon THz imaging that will be aid in determining severity and boundaries. THz is ideally suited to burn wound imaging because it is extremely sensitive to water, robust to scattering, non-ionizing, and does not require contrast agents. A complete THz imaging system developed by a UCLA research team successfully scanned skin burns on ex vivo porcine and in vivo rat models, producing high resolution images. The results of these studies are highly encouraging and demonstrate an ability to accurately measure burn severity and the progression of the local inflammatory response over time. If these results could be translated to the clinical environment, treatment of burn injuries may potentially improve and act as means to rapidly quantify the severity of burn injuries. While promising, the UCLA system has mostly been limited to imaging of near-planar surfaces and is not commercially viable.. Farus proposes to leverage the UCLA work to fully develop an alpha prototype for imaging burns using THz. The purpose of this phase I SBIR is to produce a complete and optimized system design to be built and used in Phase II for large animal and human trials.