Optical measurement apparatus for living body

An optical measurement apparatus for a living body comprising a light source for generating a light to be irradiated onto an object to be examined, a light measurement means that detects a light transmitted inside the object and generates hemoglobin signals corresponding to hemoglobin changes in the object, an assessing means that analyzes feature amounts of the hemoglobin signals and assesses a disease of the object from the analyzed feature amount, and a display means for displaying disease information of the object,

• wherein said assessing means comprises:
• an extracting means for extracting various kinds of feature amounts from the hemoglobin signals,
• a storing means for storing feature amounts of each of different disease types in a database,
• an analyzing means for analyzing feature amounts extracted by the extracting means and for estimating their similarity with the feature amounts of each disease stored in said storing means;
• and
• a quantifying means for quantifying the similarity estimated by the analyzing means.

A method of assessing a disease of an object to be examined using hemoglobin signals of the object measured by optical measurement comprising the steps of:

• measuring hemoglobin signals by optical measurement for a plurality of subjects whose diagnosis of disease among a plurality of disease groups has been established,
• extracting a plurality of feature amounts from the hemoglobin signal of each subject,
• storing the feature amounts as data in a database,
• assessing disease of the object to be examined by extracting a plurality of feature amounts from a hemoglobin signal measured by optical measurement for the object to be examined, calculating a similarity of the extracted feature amounts with data for each disease, and
• determining a disease having a highest similarity as a disease of the object to be examined.