Direct characterization of tissue dynamics with laser speckle contrast imaging

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) has gained broad appeal as a technique to monitor tissue dynamics (broadly defined to include blood flow dynamics), in part because of its remarkable simplicity. When laser light is backscattered from a tissue, it produces speckle patterns that vary in time. A measure of the speckle field decorrelation time provides information about the tissue dynamics. In conventional LSCI, this measure requires numerical fitting to a specific theoretical model for the field decorrelation. However, this model may not be known a priori, or it may vary over the image field of view. We describe a method to reconstruct the speckle field decorrelation time that is completely model free, provided that the measured speckle dynamics are ergodic. We also extend our approach to allow for the possibility of non-ergodic measurements caused by the presence of a background static speckle field. In both ergodic and non-ergodic cases, our approach accurately retrieves the correlation time without any recourse to numerical fitting and is largely independent of camera exposure time. We apply our method to tissue phantom and in-vivo mouse brain imaging. Our aim is to facilitate and add robustness to LSCI processing methods for potential clinical or pre-clinical applications.