Investigation of the Performance of Spectral Domain Optical Doppler Tomography with High-speed Line Scanning CMOS Camera and Its Application to the Blood Flow Measurement in a Micro-tube

In this study, the feasibility of spectral domain optical Doppler tomography for measuring blood flow characteristics in a micro-tube was demonstrated through several experiments. The use of an SD-ODT system in blood flow measurement can provide high resolution images (5 microns resolution). We prepared three capillary tubes to reveal the effect of different concentrations of hematocrit ratio (HR). One tube serves as the control. The two other tubes contained different concentrations of HR (5%, 25%). Three different capillary tube inlet flow velocities were tested in the present study. The Reynolds number (Re) which is based on the capillary tube inner diameter ranges from Re=6 to 48. We calculated a Doppler shift of the power spectrum of the temporal interference fringes with Kasai autocorrelation function to achieve the velocity profile of the flow. As a result, SD-ODT systems could not detect the cell depletion layer in the present study due to the limitation of spatial resolution. Nevertheless, these systems were proven to be capable of observing the RBCs of blood.