Abstract
Visualization of blood vessels is a fundamental task in the evaluation of the health and biological integrity of tissue. Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a non-invasive technique to determine the blood flow in superficial or exposed vasculature. However, the high scattering of biological tissue hinders the visualization of those structures. In this paper, we propose the use of principal component analysis (PCA) in combination with LSCI to improve the visualization of deep blood vessels by selecting the most significant principal components. This analysis was applied to in vitro samples, and our results demonstrate that this approach allows for the visualization and localization of blood vessels as deep as 1000 μm.
Highlights
Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a technique in which time-integrated speckle patterns generated by low-power laser irradiation are recorded by a CCD camera [1,2,3]
In a closely related technique, photothermal LSCI [7,8], a short pulse laser (λ = 595 nm) is used to heat up subsurface blood vessels, so the rapid heating of the molecules causes an increment in the particles motion, which traduces as a decrease in the local speckle contrast
Li et al [11] propose an eigen-decomposition filtering approach to observe in vivo, an angiography of mouse ear pinna, a very similar approach is reported by Wang et al [12], where, a real-time full-field optical angiography utilizing principal component analysis is proposed, the effect of the exposure time (T) and the thickness of the overlaying layer on the blood vessels was not studied
Summary
LSCI is a technique in which time-integrated speckle patterns generated by low-power laser irradiation (usually < 30 mW) are recorded by a CCD camera [1,2,3]. In a closely related technique, photothermal LSCI [7,8], a short pulse laser (λ = 595 nm) is used to heat up subsurface blood vessels, so the rapid heating of the molecules causes an increment in the particles motion, which traduces as a decrease in the local speckle contrast. In these invasive methods a pulsed laser or external agents are needed to modify the contrast to improve the visualization of blood vessels. Li et al [11] propose an eigen-decomposition filtering approach to observe in vivo, an angiography of mouse ear pinna, a very similar approach is reported by Wang et al [12], where, a real-time full-field optical angiography utilizing principal component analysis is proposed, the effect of the exposure time (T) and the thickness of the overlaying layer on the blood vessels was not studied
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