Open AccessEffect of skin optical absorption on speckleplethysmographic (SPG) signals
Author(s) -
Tyler B. Rice,
Bíngen Yang,
Sean White
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
biomedical optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.362
H-Index - 86
ISSN - 2156-7085
DOI - 10.1364/boe.403501
Subject(s) - imaging phantom , absorption (acoustics) , biomedical engineering , attenuation coefficient , human skin , blood flow , materials science , analysis of variance , medicine , optics , nuclear medicine , physics , biology , genetics
Recent advances in optical technology have emerged for measuring blood flow in the extremities using speckleplethysmography (SPG), which may address needs in vascular medicine and other fields. SPG has demonstrated a highly linear response with flow rate, but the susceptibility to differences in skin tone is unclear. Two validation studies using skin-simulating phantoms and a simple clinical protocol were conducted to determine the impact of absorbing skin layers on SPG measurements. Benchtop results demonstrated that the coefficient of determination between known flow rate and SPG was highly linear (R 2 = 0.990) and was unaffected by the addition of skin-phantom layers with variable absorption (R 2 = 0.996-0.999). Additionally, no significant trend was found between the fit residuals of SPG and flow rate with increasing skin-phantom absorption (R 2 =0.025, p = 0.29). In clinical testing, no significant difference was found using both a 4-way ANOVA between demographic classifications (F = 0.89, p = 0.45), and a 2-way ANOVA test between lower- and higher-melanin subclassifications (F = 0.4, p = 0.52).