Development of Speckle Contrast Optical Tomography for Mapping Cerebral Blood Flow

 Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) is an important biomarker for brain diseases and functions. It provides information of which area of brain is suffering from ischemia, and as a result can be used in a lot of clinical monitoring including stroke, ischemia, brain tumors, and traumatic brain injury. CBF is also related to brain activities. For the large number of patients in brain related disease, the bedsides measure of CBF is needed to be obtained. Therefore, we propose speckle contrast optical tomography (SCOT), a recently built method for mapping CBF, using speckle contrast (SC) measures from distinct source and detector pairs.

In this graduate seminar, I will talk about the need of mapping cerebral blood flow clinically as well as the concepts of this motion sensitive imaging system that I am building. Furthermore, I will show some applications of speckle contrast on skin and brain studies that people are working on.