Abstract
Functional performance of handheld laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is compromised by movement artefacts. Here we quantify the movements of a handheld LSCI system employing electromagnetic (EM) tracking and measure the applied translational, tilt and on-surface laser beam speeds. By observing speckle contrast on static objects, the magnitudes of translation and tilt of wavefronts are explored for various scattering levels of the objects. We conclude that for tissue mimicking static phantoms, on-surface speeds play a dominant role to wavefront tilt speed in creation of movement artefacts. The ratio depends on the optical properties of the phantom. Furthermore, with the same applied speed, the drop in the speckle contrast increases with decreasing reduced scattering coefficient, and hence the related movement artefact increases.
Highlights
As a full-field, non-invasive and affordable imaging tool, laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) has been widely investigated for applications such as blood flow studies in brain, neuroscience, dermatology, rheumatology and burns [1,2]
The LSCI system was mounted still and the phantom was rotated around a vertical axis with a constant acceleration (Fig. 3(b))
Movement artefacts during a handheld LSCI measurement are caused by tissue motions [9,11,20,21,22,23] and motions of the LSCI system [5,12,13]
Summary
As a full-field, non-invasive and affordable imaging tool, laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) has been widely investigated for applications such as blood flow studies in brain, neuroscience, dermatology, rheumatology and burns [1,2]. Since the conventional mounted LSCI systems are bulky, development of the technology as a handheld modality has gained attention in the past few years [3,4,5,6]. A handheld camera-phone based LSCI has been used to study murine cerebral malaria by visualizing retinal perfusion [7]. A handheld LSCI can help comfortably monitoring any skin area of a patient, for instance when their knees or feet needed to be observed in case of having Psoriasis, burns or diabetic wounds. Beside the advantages of portability, integrability and affordability, movement artefacts pose challenges in performing an accurate and reliable measurement
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