Real-Time Laser Speckle Imaging of Blood Flow with High Gray Level and High Resolution

Abstract

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a large measurement ranging, real-time, high spatial resolution optical imaging method. Exisiting reserches show that the low gray level (8-bit) and low resolution (752×480 pixels) camera can effectively monitor the flow of scattering media such as blood, but the defects such as large noise of scattered particles and small effective imaging area are difficult to be compensated by software, which seriously affects the imaging quality. Monitoring blood flow with a camera with a high gray level (16-bit) and a high resolution (2 048×2 048 pixels) will slow down the imaging speed of a single frame, and parallel computing can reduce the image processing time by 1/3. With the aid of an animal blood flow experiment, the results of high-gray-level and high-resolution spatial laser speckle contrast imaging (sLSCI), spatial approximate laser speckle contrast imaging (sLSCIa), and temporal laser speckle contrast imaging (tLSCI) were compared and analyzed using imaging speed and imaging quality as evaluation criteria. The parallel computation of high-gray-level and high-resolution sLSCI takes into consideration both imaging quality and imaging speed, which can meet the requirements of clinical real-time monitoring of blood flow.

Keywords

• laser speckle contrast imaging (lsci)
• blood flow monitoring
• image processing technology
• parallel computing