Simultaneous extraction of tissue blood flow and surface geometry using innovative scDCT (Conference Presentation)

Near-infrared speckle contrast diffuse correlation tomography (scDCT) is a depth-sensitive technique for 2D/3D imaging of deep tissue blood flow. scDCT uses a scanning long-coherence point source and a 2D camera to capture diffuse spatial laser speckle contrast images for reconstructing blood flow distributions at different depths. Traditionally, a photometric stereo technique (PST) was used to extract tissue surface geometry via shining four LEDs on tissue surface from different angles. However, PST scanning poses challenges to intraoperative operation and prolongs measurement time. We developed an innovative approach to extract both tissue surface geometry and deep tissue blood flow using the collected scDCT boundary data. We evaluated the new scDCT approach in rodent heads, human hands, and human breasts. Results demonstrated accurate reconstructions of tissue surface geometries and blood flow distributions at different depths. Future work will implement the acquired geometric information into tissue blood flow reconstruction to improve image reconstruction accuracy.