Towards Applying Hyperspectral Imagery as an Intraoperative Visual Aid Tool

During a surgery, the inevitable presence of blood covering the surgical field demands efforts to keep the area as clean as possible. A new hyperspectral data processing method is being developed to deliver clearer images to the surgeon. The analysis of optical absorption properties of the blood and water indicates that, between the visible and near infrared spectral regions, some valuable information under the blood layer may be obtained using a spectral imaging system. We propose a neural network approach to provide a nonlinear combination of spectral band reflectance in order to reveal images that could not be seeing with unprocessed images. This paper describes the implementation of single-layer and multi-layer perceptron architectures to perform the hyperspectral data processing. We present experimental results attesting the viability of the proposed method. We demonstrate that hyperspectral imagery can be exploited as visual aid for surgical guidance.