Differential imaging of dynamic scattering from laser speckle images for applications in perfusion monitoring

Non-invasive assessment of tissue perfusion has gained increased interest in the recent past for monitoring various physiological dysfunctions. Laser speckle imaging and associated processing techniques present useful and inexpensive methods of achieving this goal. However, differentiating the effects of static and dynamic scatterers from the captured speckle image is challenging and limits the sensitivity of such techniques. This paper presents a fractal analysis in the temporal domain to assess the various dynamic scattering features of tissue perfusion demonstrated on a perfusion model. We use detrended fluctuation analysis for the quantitative assessment of image fractal dimensions, which reflect the concentration and flow features of the moving scatterers in the perfusion model.