IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2018 Jul;22(4):1019-1025. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2017.2726540. Epub 2017 Jul 13.
Diabetes may cause different foot problems, which could easily lead to infection, ulcers, and increasing risk of amputation due to nerve or vascular injury. In order to reduce the risk of amputation, Buerger's exercise is frequently used for rehabilitation to improve the blood circulation in lower limbs. However, it is difficult to evaluate the rehabilitation efficiency with Buerger's exercise objectively. In this study, a novel non-invasively optical system is developed to non-invasively monitor the change of the foot blood circulation before and after long-term Buerger's exercise. Radial basis function neural network is also used for classifying the healthy and diabetic groups from the change of relative total hemoglobin (HbT) concentration and tissue oxygen saturation (StO2) and providing an index to evaluate the rehabilitation efficiency with Buerger's exercise. Finally, the experimental results show that the relative HbT concentration and StO2 in lower limbs corresponding to different groups are significantly different and could be used as the factors for the classification of healthy subjects and diabetic foot patients. Moreover, the tendency of the relative HbT concentration and StO2 rise after the long-term rehabilitation with Buerger's exercise.
糖尿病可能会导致不同的足部问题，这些问题容易导致感染、溃疡，并由于神经或血管损伤而增加截肢的风险。为了降低截肢的风险，经常使用伯格氏运动进行康复治疗，以改善下肢的血液循环。然而，伯格氏运动的康复效果很难进行客观评估。在这项研究中，开发了一种新颖的非侵入性光学系统，用于非侵入性地监测长期伯格氏运动前后足部血液循环的变化。还使用了径向基函数神经网络，根据相对总血红蛋白（HbT）浓度和组织氧饱和度（StO2）的变化来对健康组和糖尿病组进行分类，并提供一个评估伯格氏运动康复效果的指标。最后，实验结果表明，不同组的下肢相对 HbT 浓度和 StO2 有显著差异，可作为区分健康受试者和糖尿病足患者的因素。此外，伯格氏运动长期康复后相对 HbT 浓度和 StO2 升高的趋势。
