mHealth hyperspectral learning for instantaneous spatiospectral imaging of hemodynamics

Hyperspectral imaging acquires data in both the spatial and frequency domains to offer abundant physical or biological information. However, conventional hyperspectral imaging has intrinsic limitations of bulky instruments, slow data acquisition rate, and spatiospectral trade-off. Here we introduce hyperspectral learning for snapshot hyperspectral imaging in which sampled hyperspectral data in a small subarea are incorporated into a learning algorithm to recover the hypercube. Hyperspectral learning exploits the idea that a photograph is more than merely a picture and contains detailed spectral information. A small sampling of hyperspectral data enables spectrally informed learning to recover a hypercube from a red–green–blue (RGB) image without complete hyperspectral measurements. Hyperspectral learning is capable of recovering full spectroscopic resolution in the hypercube, comparable to high spectral resolutions of scientific spectrometers. Hyperspectral learning also enables ultrafast dynamic imaging, leveraging ultraslow video recording in an off-the-shelf smartphone, given that a video comprises a time series of multiple RGB images. To demonstrate its versatility, an experimental model of vascular development is used to extract hemodynamic parameters via statistical and deep learning approaches. Subsequently, the hemodynamics of peripheral microcirculation is assessed at an ultrafast temporal resolution up to a millisecond, using a conventional smartphone camera. This spectrally informed learning method is analogous to compressed sensing; however, it further allows for reliable hypercube recovery and key feature extractions with a transparent learning algorithm. This learning-powered snapshot hyperspectral imaging method yields high spectral and temporal resolutions and eliminates the spatiospectral trade-off, offering simple hardware requirements and potential applications of various machine learning techniques.