Gastric Mucosal Blood Flow Imaging Using A Laser Speckle Method

Abstract

Many lesions in the gastric mucosa have been reported to be caused by change of gastric mucosal blood flow. Several methods have been being used to investigate the mucosal blood flow, but these methods including a laser Doppler methods can merely measure the pin-point area blood flow of the gastric mucosa. Therefore, the experiments have had to be carried out in many different positions to get two-dimensional (2D) information of gastric mucosal blood flow. If the blood flow of broad area of gastric mucosa can be simultaneously measured, further information of the cause of gastric lesions must be available with less effort. The aim of this study is 2D-imaging the gastric mucosal blood flow using a laser speckle method. Using this method, we observed the blood flow in the gastric mucosae of rats and dogs and acquired the 2D-maps of the gastric mucosal blood flow image. Moreover, we have developed an area sensor: it was composed with ten thousand CCD to be able to get rapidly blood flow images without scanning. Using this apparatus, we examined human volunteers and obtained the 2D-map of blood flow in the gastric mucosa under the endoscopy. The blood flow measurement with the apparatus utilized by the laser speckle method has enable us to image the sequential blood flow change in gastric mucosae with any invasion. We suggest that this method of measuring blood flow is extremely useful to investigate gastric lesions.