Abdlaty Ramy, Hayward Joseph, Farrell Thomas, Fang Qiyin
Military Technical College, Cairo, Egypt.
Juravinski Cancer Centre, Hamilton Health Sciences, Ontario, Canada.
Photodiagnosis Photodyn Ther. 2021 Mar;33:102127. doi: 10.1016/j.pdpdt.2020.102127. Epub 2020 Dec 1.
Skin erythema may present due to many causes. One of the common causes is prolonged exposure to sun rays. Other than sun exposure, skin erythema is an accompanying sign of dermatological diseases such as acne, psoriasis, melasma, post inflammatory hyperpigmentation, fever, as well as exposure to specific electromagnetic wave bands.
Quantifying skin erythema in patients enables the dermatologist to assess the patient's skin health. Therefore, quantitative assessment of skin erythema was the target of several studies. The clinical standard for erythema evaluation is visual assessment. However, the former standard has some imperfections. For instance, it is subjective, and unqualified for precise color information exchange. To overcome these shortcomings, the past three decades witnessed various methodologies that aimed to achieve erythema objective assessment, such as diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), and both optical and non-optical systems.
This review article reports on the studies published in the past three decades where the performance, the mathematical tactics for computation, and the capabilities of erythema assessment techniques for cutaneous diseases are discussed. In particular, the achievements and limitations of the current techniques in erythema assessment are presented.
The profits and development trends of optical and non-optical methods are displayed to provide the researcher with awareness into the present technological advances and its potential for dermatological diseases research.
皮肤红斑可能由多种原因引起。常见原因之一是长时间暴露于阳光下。除了阳光照射外，皮肤红斑还是痤疮、银屑病、黄褐斑、炎症后色素沉着、发热等皮肤病以及暴露于特定电磁波段时的伴随症状。
对患者的皮肤红斑进行量化，有助于皮肤科医生评估患者的皮肤健康状况。因此，对皮肤红斑进行定量评估是多项研究的目标。红斑评估的临床标准是视觉评估。然而，前一种标准存在一些缺陷。例如，它具有主观性，且无法进行精确的颜色信息交换。为克服这些缺点，在过去三十年中出现了各种旨在实现红斑客观评估的方法，如漫反射光谱法（DRS）以及光学和非光学系统。
这篇综述文章报道了过去三十年发表的研究，其中讨论了皮肤病红斑评估技术的性能、计算数学策略和能力。特别是，介绍了当前红斑评估技术的成就和局限性。
展示了光学和非光学方法的优势及发展趋势，以便让研究人员了解当前的技术进展及其在皮肤病研究中的潜力。
