Tunable dynamical tissue phantom for laser speckle imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a new tunable tissue phantom for laser speckle imaging that accurately mimics blood flow dynamics using stochastic differential equations and a piezoelectric actuator.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to create a customizable tissue phantom with controllable speckle dynamics for in-vivo blood flow imaging.

Findings

The phantom can generate speckles that replicate surface and deep tissue blood flow.

It uses SDE-controlled piezoelectric actuators for precise speckle pattern control.

Validation shows high accuracy and wide range of dynamic speckle simulation.

Abstract

We introduce a novel method to design and implement a tunable dynamical tissue phantom for laser speckle-based in-vivo blood flow imaging. This approach relies on Stochastic Differential Equations (SDE) to control a piezoelectric actuator which, upon illuminated with a laser source, generates speckles of pre-defined probability density function and auto-correlation. The validation experiments show that the phantom can generate dynamic speckles that closely replicate both surfaces as well as deep tissue blood flow for a reasonably wide range and accuracy.