Blood flow imaging using high-performance processing in hardware

What is it about?

Blood flow in the superficial skin can be imaged using back-scattered laser light, due to the light's interaction with moving red blood cells. This technique has been developed for several decades, but has suffered from both the lack of absolut measurement units and the slow processing required by the algorithms. This work is a first step towards a system that can overcome both of these problems, using high-performance parallel computing on an FPGA to achieve real-time, video-rate blood flow images.

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Why is it important?

The ability to monitor blood flow in the superficial capillaries in a large spatial area, in real-time, and with high enough framerate to be able to follow dynamic changes would greatly benefit several clinical applications, such as burn wound investigation and for patient with peripheral arterial disease. The presented technique is a step towards such an instrument, and also has the benefit of being completely non-contract and harmless.