The research on noninvasive detection of skin cholesterol by diffuse reflectance spectroscopy

Skin cholesterol is a novel biomarker to assess the risk of atherosclerotic diseases. To detect skin cholesterol noninvasively and rapidly, a system was designed based on the diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The feasibility of this system was validated through detecting cholesterol of pig skin samples, and skin cholesterol in vivo of subjects. The experimental results showed that, diffuse reflectance absorbance integrated intensity S measured the concentration of cholesterol in the pig skin samples quantitatively. After adjusting for age, gender and other factors, it showed a significant positive correlation between S of subjects and the total cholesterol (TC), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) which were the main risk factors for atherosclerotic diseases with the correlation coefficients 0.860(P < 0.01) and 0.787(P < 0.01). The study has shown that the diffuse reflectance spectroscopy provides a noninvasive and convenient method for the detection of skin cholesterol, and the noninvasive detection of skin cholesterol in vivo will contribute to the early detection of atherosclerotic diseases.