Dual-exposure temporal laser speckle imaging for simultaneously accessing microvascular blood perfusion and angiography

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) has gained significant attention in the biomedical field for its ability to map the spatio-temporal dynamics of blood perfusion in vivo. However, LSCI faces difficulties in accurately resolving blood perfusion in microvessels. Although the transmissive detecting geometry can improve the spatial resolution of tissue imaging, ballistic photons directly transmitting forward through tissue without scattering will cause misestimating in the flow speed by LSCI because of the lack of a quantitative theoretical model of transmissvie LSCI. Here, we develop a model of temporal LSCI which accounts for the effect of nonscattered light on estimating decorrelation time. Based on this model, we further propose a dual-exposure temporal laser speckle imaging method (dEtLSCI) to correct the overestimation of background speed when performing traditional transmissive LSCI, and reconstruct microvascular angiography using the scattered component extracted from total transmitted light. Experimental results demonstrated that our new method opens an opportunity for LSCI to simultaneously resolve the blood vessels morphology and blood flow speed at microvascular level in various contexts, ranging from the drug-induced vascular response to angiogenesis and the blood perfusion monitoring during tumor growth.