Estimation of near subcutaneous blood microcirculation related blood flow using laser speckle contrast imaging

Blood flow is considered as critical quantity in the development of living beings for instance transportation of nutrients and preserving body temperature. The heart-rate may be important from point of view of development of whole organism and its metabolism, of circulation. In research area, many optical methodologies have been developed to monitor blood flow and heart-rate in humans and animals. Electrocardiography has been widely used to measure heart-rate. To monitor blood flow; laser Doppler Flowmetry, Photo Acoustic Tomography, Optical Tomography and Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging have been utilized. The most important feature in these methods is non-invasiveness. On the other hand Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging is an efficient and simple modality for imaging of dynamics in heterogenic media (like human or animal tissue). This is mostly used in biomedical imaging of blood flow and recently in measurement of heart-rate since it obtains excellent temporal and spatial resolution. In this study, to monitor blood flow rate and imaging vasculature structure of chicken embryos and also to measure heart-rate of embryonic egg without removing the shell, an optical method based on Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging has been developed. For flow and vascular imaging, 20 intact eggs on eleventh day of incubation were used. To measure heart-rate, embryonic eggs between 4th and 14th day of incubation were utilized. Based on the data aquired from both applications in this study it isobserved that, the proposed measuring setup and analysis method have provided sufficient results.