Quantitative analysis of lesion images to evaluate the efficiency of vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy for port-wine stains: four case reports

Vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy (V-PDT) is a clinically approved therapeutic approach for treating vascular-related diseases, such as port-wine stains (PWS). For accurate treatment, varying light irradiance is required for different lesions due to the irregularity of vascular size, shape and degree of disease, which commonly alters during different stages of V-PDT. This makes quantitative analysis of the treatment efficiency urgently needed. Lesion images pre- and post- V-PDT treatment of patients with PWS were used to construct a quantitative method to evaluate the differences among lesions. Image analysis techniques were applied to evaluate the V-PDT efficiency for PWS by determining the Euclidean distances and two-dimensional correlation coefficients. According to the image analysis, V-PDT with good treatment efficiency resulted in a larger Euclidean distance and a smaller correlation coefficient compared with the case having lower V-PDT efficiency. A new method to quantify the Euclidean distances and correlation coefficients has been proposed, which is promising for the quantitative analysis of V-PDT efficiency for PWS.