Determination of newborn jaundice level by transcutaneous bilirubin measurement

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is a method for obtaining optical properties of skin to determine the biochemical and physiological information. Transcutaneous bilirubin (TcB) measurement is a practice that uses reflectance spectroscopy based on visible spectrum to determine the jaundice level in newborns. It has some advantages over total serum bilirubin (TSB) such as being non-invasive, non-infectious, painless, instantaneous etc. In this study, it is aimed to develop a jaundice level prediction algorithm with artificial neural network (ANN) by using the diffuse reflectance spectra that are obtained by an in-house developed device. For this purpose, TcB and TSB measurements were taken from 314 infants and the algorithm was developed. The predicted jaundice levels were compared with the TSB results in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and correlation (r). The developed algorithm gave satisfying results in the sense of accurately predicting the jaundice level. The obtained r value between TSB and TcB is nearly 0.94.