Full-field amplitude speckle decorrelation angiography: a simple and cost-effective technique for skin microvascular imaging (Conference Presentation)

We propose a new simple and cost-effective optical imaging technique, full-field amplitude speckle decorrelation angiography (FASDA), that can be implemented with cameras with conventional frame rates, is insensitive to skin pigmentation and is capable of classifying the imaged vessels into slow- and fast-flow ones. The proposed imaging technique is based on the simultaneous evaluation of two metrics: the blood flow index, a contrast-based metric used in laser speckle contrast imaging, and the adaptive speckle decorrelation index (ASDI), a new metric that we defined based on the second-order autocorrelation function that considers the limited speckle modulation that occurs in partially-coherent imaging. We demonstrate excellent delineation of slow-flow vessels in different skin lesions using ASDI and fast-flow vessels using BFI, providing a powerful new tool for the imaging of microvasculature with significantly lower hardware complexity than other optical imaging techniques.