Chromaticity Shifts associated with 02AMP Chroma Enhancing Lenses

Background: The Hemo-Iso and Oxy-Iso glasses (produced by the O2AMP™) are currently marketed as lenses to aid in “bruise finding” and to amplify vein recognition in hospital settings. It is postulated that the Oxy-Iso lenses shift the color transmission of visible wavelengths that are hard to discriminate with the naked eye. Intuitively, the design principle of the Hemo-Iso glasses predicts a shift of the chromaticity coordinates of colors away from the red spectrum towards the green spectrum to aid in bruise identification. While the Oxy-Iso Vein lenses shift the spectrum away from the green towards the color spectrum for vein identification. This study measured the shift in the chromaticity coordinates of color caps comprising the FM-100 hue arrangement tests caused by these two marketed chroma enhancing lenses. Methods: The chromaticity coordinates of every other hue cap comprising the FM-100 arrangement test were measured without and with both the Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso lenses using the Minolta CS-100A Chromometer. All tests were conducted under standard lighting approximating the Illuminant C light source. Chromaticity coordinates for each cap were plotted on the CIE-xy chromaticity diagram. Ellipses were fit to the resulting hue contours to extract geometric indices that characterized the shifts of the hue contours of the FM-100 without and with the lenses. Results: The chromaticity coordinates for the FM100 that were plotted on the CIE-chromaticity diagram. This plot showed a shift toward the red and green color spectrum when comparing measurements first without and then with the O2AMP™ lenses. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that the Hemo-Iso lenses will shift the color spectrum toward shorter wavelengths while the Oxy-Iso lenses will shift the color spectrum to the longer wavelengths. Clinical applications of where these lenses can be useful will be discussed.