We present a first evaluation of a new multi-exposure laser speckle contrast imaging (MELSCI) system for assessing spatial variations in the microcirculatory perfusion. The MELSCI system is based on a 1000 frames per second 1-megapixel camera connected to a field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) capable of producing MELSCI data in realtime. The imaging system is evaluated against a single point laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) system during occlusionrelease provocations of the arm in five subjects. Perfusion is calculated from MELSCI data using current state-of-the-art inverse models. The analysis displayed a good agreement between measured and modeled data, with an average error below 6%. This strongly indicates that the applied model is capable of accurately describing the MELSCI data and that the acquired data is of high quality. Comparing readings from the occlusion-release provocation showed that the MELSCI perfusion was significantly correlated (R=0.83) to the single point LDF perfusion, clearly outperforming perfusion estimations based on a single exposure time. We conclude that the MELSCI system provides blood flow images of enhanced quality, taking us one step closer to a system that accurately can monitor dynamic changes in skin perfusion over a large area in real-time.

Date Published: 20 February 2018
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10505, High-Speed Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy III: Toward Big Data Instrumentation and Management, 1050518 (20 February 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2286248

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10505:
High-Speed Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy III: Toward Big Data Instrumentation and Management
Kevin K. Tsia; Keisuke Goda, Editor(s)