Patent ID: 7729747

Claim:
A non-invasive method of imaging variations in tissue oxygenation, perfusion or hydration comprising: providing a tissue portion suspected of having poor tissue oxygenation; subjecting the tissue portion to absorption spectral analysis at least one visible or near-infrared wavelength, thereby providing an image; separating the image into pixels by location; applying logarithmic residual correction to eliminate shadowing in the image determining the relative contributions of hemoglobin, oxyhemoglobin and water in the tissue portion to the resulting spectrum measured at representative pixels and thereby generating oxygen saturation and hydration images; applying a truncated principal component expansion to provide more compact and higher signal to noise representation and selectively removing those principal components that provide redundant information or contribute to image noise; clustering the representative pixels into clusters having a similar spectral response; applying cluster analysis such that the differences in intra-cluster spectral responses are minimized while maximizing inter-cluster differences; and fragmenting the clusters onto an image of the tissue portion, thereby generating images of the tissue portion for visual inspection.