Study on blood-flow pulsation using laser speckle contrast imaging

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is becoming an established method for full-field imaging of blood flow dynamics in animal models. Blood flow pulsation originated from heart beat affects blood flow measurement results of LSCI and it is considered as major physiology noise source for most biomedical applications. But in some biomedical applications, the details of the pulsation process might provide useful information for disease diagnostics. In this study, we investigated the ability as well as the limitation of LSCI in monitoring flow pulsation in phantom study. Both intralipid (2% - 5%) and human whole blood samples are used in phantom study. A syringe pump is controlled by a computer-programmable motor controller and liquid phantom is pushed through a 400 mu m ID capillary tube by the pump at different pulsation patterns, varied in frequency (1-7 Hz), valley-to-peak ratio (10%-50%), acceleration/deceleration rate, etc. Speckle contrast images are acquired at 15-30 frames-per-seconds. Our results show: (1) it is very hard for LSCI to pick up signals from high frequency pulsation (5-7 Hz), which is close to the heart back frequency of rats. This might be caused by the nature of fluid dynamics of blood during pulsation. LSCI might not work well for animal models in detecting pulsation. (2) With low frequency pulsation (1 Hz, close to human normal pulsation rate), our experimental results shows from most pulsation patterns, LSCI could catch the fine details of the blood flow change in a cycle. LSCI might be used for studying human blood flow pulsation.