Detection of Exposed Nerves in Two Individuals In Vivo and Unexposed Nerves Ex Vivo with Near-Infrared Hyperspectral Laparoscope

In this study, a laparoscopic device, which can conduct near-infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR- HSI) was developed for the first time in the world. The optical system was developed with a spectroscopic element, AOTF, which enables non-invasive acquisition of specimen spectrum in the wavelength range of 490 nm to 1600 nm. Using this system, exposed nerves of living pigs were acquired; a total of four nerves from two pigs were imaged by a neural network using leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. The system provides accuracy of 84.6 %, recall of 65.7 %, and specificity of 85.3 %, respectively. In addition, a detection was performed on a specimen with a 2 mm thick mesentery membrane placed on top of the nerves extracted from a pig. The results were accuracy of 95.2 %, recall of 95.2 %, and specificity of 95.1 %, respectively. Through this study, the developed laparoscopic device is expected to be useful for visualization of tissues in living specimens and in deep tissues of the living body.