Simplified laser-speckle-imaging analysis method and its application to retinal blood flow imaging

Laser speckle imaging (LSI) is widely used to study blood flow at high spatiotemporal resolution. Several papers recently pointed out that the commonly used LSI equation involves an approximation that could result in incorrect data analysis. We investigated the impact of such an approximation and introduced a simplified analysis method to improve computation time. Flow phantom studies were performed for validation. Moreover, we demonstrated a novel LSI application by imaging blood flow of rat retinas under normal and physiologic-challenge conditions. Because blood-flow abnormality is implicated in many retinal diseases, LSI could provide valuable physiologic, and potentially diagnostic, information. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America.