Development and Application of Augmented Smartphone-enabled Imaging in Mobile Health

Abstract

Mobile health techniques aim to deliver healthcare remotely and wirelessly using surging computing power and mobile connectivity. The commercial smartphone is naturally becoming a popular partner device due to its computing/communication capacity and built-in sensors, such as the camera, microphone and touch screen modules. Among these sensing units, the camera is experiencing extensive technical iterations and nowadays capable of delivering medical-grade imaging, which fashioned a foundation for an important branch of mobile health techniques: the smartphone-enabled imaging from afar. The main goal of this thesis is to develop augmented smartphone-enabled imaging techniques and apply them in health evaluation. To achieve the augmentation, intrinsic medical information will be mined from the regular vision data stream, including smartphone photographs and videos. Firstly, smartphone-enabled multispectral imaging will be developed based on the snapshot RGB-mode photography. Corresponding system and method will be applied and tested in detecting chromophores in human tissue. Then, this technique will be expanded to realize smartphone-enabled multispectral fluorescence imaging to detect porphyrins to estimate the bacterial contamination within skin tissue and oral cavity. Further, smartphone-enabled multispectral remote photoplethysmography will be developed to spatially monitor the skin oxygenations and hemodynamics. Lastly, a multifunctional platform will be developed to integrate these augmented smartphone imaging functions into a mobile app and clinically validated in predicting the blood bilirubin level of patients with liver diseases.