Abstract
In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time that the detailed cutaneous blood flow at capillary level within dermis of human skin can be imaged by optical micro-angiography (OMAG) technique. A novel scanning protocol, i.e. fast B scan mode is used to achieve the capillary flow imaging. We employ a 1310nm system to scan the skin tissue at an imaging rate of 300 frames per second, which requires only ~5 sec to complete one 3D imaging of capillary blood flow within skin. The technique is sensitive enough to image the very slow blood flows at ~4 microm/sec. The promising results show a great potential of OMAG's role in the diagnosis, treatment and management of human skin diseases.
Highlights
Better assessment of cutaneous microcirculations may provide important diagnostic information for pathological conditions in dermatology, for example skin cancer, port wine stain treatment, diabetes and plastic surgery
To test performance of the UHS-optical micro-angiography (OMAG) to image the blood flow, we imaged skin located at the backside of hand of a male volunteer
We obtained the traditional OMAG and phase resolved optical Doppler tomography (PRODT) cross-sectional flow images, for which we captured 2000 A scans over 2 mm at an imaging speed of 31,000 A scans per second in order to fulfill the oversampling requirement for these previous methods
Summary
Better assessment of cutaneous microcirculations may provide important diagnostic information for pathological conditions in dermatology, for example skin cancer, port wine stain treatment, diabetes and plastic surgery. The spatial resolution is low that makes them difficult, if not impossible, to provide detailed visualization of the cutaneous micro-blood vessel networks They do not provide depth-resolved imaging capability. This technique relies on the transient optical energy deposition within blood (i.e., due to light absorption) and subsequent detection of acoustic emission from the blood volume to achieve blood vessel isolation for imaging Though it has high enough penetration depth (>1 mm), the relatively low spatial resolution (∼50 μm) makes it difficult to resolve the capillary blood vessel networks, which requires an imaging resolution at ∼10 μm
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