Laser Doppler perfusion monitoring and imaging: novel approaches

Laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) is a non invasive method enabling the monitoring of microvascular blood flow, a very important marker of tissue health. This article gives an overview on the concept of LDF for microvascular perfusion monitoring and imaging. It first describes the theoretical background of the technique. Then, the benefits of LDF signal processing are shown through clinical examples: use of time–frequency representations and wavelets. Afterwards, the paper introduces novel approaches of velocity components. For that purpose, a work providing the determination of the velocities relative contribution in physiologically relevant units (mm/s) is presented. Imaging perfusion is also reviewed through methods based on laser speckle. The most prominent disadvantage of the latter devices being the time needed to produce a perfusion image, solutions are proposed in the last part of the paper.