Laser speckle contrast images: processing of data to analyze microvascular variations in hand skin of healthy subjects
Résumé
Diseases such as frostbite, Raynaud’s phenomenon, carpal tunnel syndrome, systemic sclerosis, hand burns, hand flaps or hand wounds lead to microvascular dysfunctions. These diseases can affect only one hand and even sometimes only some fingers. Therefore, in order to quantify the microvascular alterations, it can be useful to compare microvascular perfusion of both hands (altered versus healthy hand). However, skin microvasculature presents spatial variations and the possibility to directly compare perfusion values of the two hands has not been studied yet. We therefore propose to quantify these spatial variations. For this purpose, perfusion values from laser speckle contrast images (LSCI) of the two hands (dorsal faces) from seven young healthy subjects are acquired simultaneously and then processed. The results show that the dorsal faces of the two hands in our young healthy subjects present close perfusion values (average coefficient of variation less than 9% for our subjects). These findings are preliminary observations to quantify the microvascular alterations in the above-mentioned diseases. The coefficient of variation in diseased states remains to be studied in order to see whether LSCI could be of interest to improve the diagnosis of hand skin pathologies.