ASK THE EXPERT: DR. ADAM LANDSMAN
ASK THE EXPERT
Dr. Landsman is a Podiatrist in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Massachusetts General providing expert care for foot and ankle conditions. A board-certified foot surgeon, he serves as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.
How has SnapshotNIR enabled you to provide better patient care?
The SnapshotNIR is a tool that allows us to measure and assess things that previously we could not. Another plus for patient care is that Snapshot is not just a diagnostic tool, but also helps guide the course of treatment from start to finish. The ability to look at the level of O2 in the skin with the NIRS (Near-infrared spectroscopy) images, where previously we could only look at the macroscopic level, has been a great advancement to wound care. What was happening at skin level was often not obvious before the use of this medical imaging device.
What was the learning curve like when using the SnapshotNIR device for you and your team when you first received it?
The device is extremely easy to use. Like any new technology, there is some practice that is necessary to ensure you are capturing a wound at the optimal angle, however, the menus are highly intuitive and it didn’t take long to get it up and running. My team uses it on a daily basis.
In your work with patients with chronic wounds, how has showing them the images captured on SnapshotNIR changed their outlook towards their recovery or their compliance to a treatment program?
Showing a series of SnapshotNIR images to a patient helps explain tissue oxygenation and how the treatment is progressing. The wound size feature on the device is a very powerful visual for patients. Seeing is believing - a patient seeing a 20-30% drop in wound size in only a couple of weeks has a very positive influence on a patient. The patient usually becomes more compliant with the course of treatment we feel would be best for them based on Snapshot’s data.
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