Hybrid optical monitoring setup for biological tissue diagnosis and assessment: Experimental study

The use of noninvasive multi-parametric imaging platforms to guide pathological diagnosis and therapeutic procedures can significantly improve clinical outcomes. A hybrid optical imaging modality integrating laser speckles, image fusion processing, and temperature measurement was utilized to monitor dynamic parametric responses in live tissue. Speckle imaging, based on two laser sources, was employed to map hemodynamic and metabolic feature changes following hypoxic ischemic brain injury in a mouse model. Each tissue feature measurement was then fused with white light images obtained by an LED illumination source with improved contrast, allowing more details to be seen on the merged image. Concurrently, cerebral tissue temperature was imaged by a thermal camera providing additional information on physiological tissue condition. Overall, the multimodal monitoring method presented here utilizes the advantages of three techniques to characterize macroscopic tissue physiological parameters and the results illustrate the ability of our system to simultaneously track and visualize changes in those parameters which can provide insight into tissue states.