Editor's Note: In this video interview, Dr. Swoboda shares key insights from her poster, "Wearable Fluorescence Visualization Systems in Complex Wound Assessment," presented at the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) Fall in Las Vegas, NV, in October 2024.

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Transcript

I'm Dr. Laura Swoboda. I'm a translational scientist, a family nurse practitioner, and I'm also a skin and wound specialist in the Milwaukee area.

So, one of the posters that I'm presenting at SAWC Fall this year is on wearable fluorescence visualization systems, and it's a mouthful, but it's a very useful novel design for wound fluorescence. We use wound fluorescence to visualize if there's heavy bacterial loads in the wound, so more than 10 to the fourth colony forming units is generally accepted as the threshold where it's bioburden enough to be considered an infection or serious bioburden. So, we use fluorescence imaging to do that, but the limitation now is that first-generation devices are really expensive. We're talking more like tens of thousands of dollars and that's just not accessible to most of the US, much less the globe.

So, I really like this novel design of a wearable fluorescence system and you can wear it on glasses that has the correct kind of coating on the glasses to filter out as it's supposed to, or what I actually like to do is to hold the device, and you can easily switch between kind of a flashlight, so adding more light to the wound if you need it, and then into that fluorescence imaging. So, the poster was really about using this in clinical practice and seeing, "Does it perform at least as well as the really expensive kind of predicate device?" And it did, I found it very useful. I took it with me all the way to Gaza. I was using it in a low resource setting. Obviously a lot of bacterial contamination there. I was able to keep it safe, so it shows it's a very robust device that can handle some travel. Bring it all the way back and use it in the Milwaukee area (for) my patient's there, so a very useful device. I'm happy. I think it's going to be a lot more accessible for people.