Influence of wavefront types on movement artefacts in handheld laser speckle contrast perfusion imaging

Abstract

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a non-invasive and affordable technique to visualize skin perfusion. Handheld use of the system facilitates measurements on various skin areas in a flexible manner. However, movement artefacts caused by handheld operation or test subject movements hamper its performance. In this work, we study the influence of the laser beam type in handheld-LSCI by evaluating the speckle contrast on static objects for beams with planar, spherical or scrambled wavefronts, and for movement artefacts caused by tilting or translation of wavefronts. We show that the scrambled waves made by often-used engineered diffusers lead to significantly larger movement artefacts than planar or spherical waves.