This STW (NWO) project which aims to develop a handheld device for quick and accurate reconstruction of the 3D tissue surface combined with the laser speckle image processing results for accurate 3D visualization of the red blood cell speed and concentration just under the skin.
Microcirculatory tissue perfusion is crucial for tissue viability, and plays an important role in various diseases and in healing tissue damage. Tissue perfusion imaging can have a role in diagnosis, staging of diseases, and planning and monitoring of therapy, and surgery outcome.
Examples are the diagnosis of second degree burns, vascular complications related to diabetes mellitus, skin diseases transplanted tissue flaps.
Current systems for whole field perfusion scanning often are too bulky for easy use at the bed side or in the operation theatre. Furthermore imaging certain parts of the body, such as heels, elbows and lower legs, often requires inconvenient manoeuvers and body positions. Finally, in current systems tissue curvature has a distorting effect on perfusion images.
Our vision is to develop technology for a device with the following features: it is compact and handheld, typically with the size of a normal camera; it can cope with the inevitable movements between the instrument and the subject; it can scan a large tissue area by manually ‘sweeping’ the laser beam over the tissue in a controlled but flexible manner; its algorithms are able to stitch all perfusion information together, while suppressing curvature artefacts; it is able to make 3D and AR visualization for showing the perfusion information.
The results will be guiding the medical doctors for quick and conscious decision making with computer visualizations or with augmented guidance.
Partners
Prof.dr.ir. W. Steenbergen Professor/UT-BMPI Project leader
Expertise in laser Doppler/speckle
Dr.ir. F. van der Heijden Associate
associate professor/UT-RAM
Expertise in image analysis / pattern recognition/ computer vision
Dr. M. Seyger Assoc. professor/Radboudumc
Expertise in dermatology, esp. psoriasis