Diagnosis of Skin Vascular Complications Revealed by Time-Frequency Analysis and Laser Doppler Spectrum Decomposition

Evgeny Zherebtsov, Igor Kozlov, Viktor Dremin, Alexander Bykov, Andrey Dunaev, Igor Meglinski

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Nowadays, photonics-based techniques are used extensively in various applications, including functional clinical diagnosis, progress monitoring in treatment, and provision of metrological control. In fact, in the frame of practical implementation of optical methods, such as laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF), the qualitative interpretation and quantitative assessment of the detected signal remains vital and urgently required. In the conventional LDF approach, the key measured parameters, index of microcirculation and perfusion rate, are proportional to an averaged concentration of red blood cells (RBC) and their average velocity within a diagnostic volume. These quantities compose mixed signals from different vascular beds with a range of blood flow velocities and are typically expressed in relative units. In the current paper we introduce a new signal processing approach for the decomposition of LDF power spectra in terms of ranging blood flow distribution by frequency series. The developed approach was validated in standard occlusion tests conducted on healthy volunteers, and applied to investigate the influence of local pressure rendered by a probe on the surface of the skin. Finally, in limited clinical trials, we demonstrate that the approach can significantly improve the diagnostic accuracy of detection of microvascular changes in the skin of the feet in patients with Diabetes Mellitus type 2, as well as age-specific changes. The results obtained show that the developed approach of LDF signal decomposition provides essential new information about blood flow and blood microcirculation and has great potential in the diagnosis of vascular complications associated with various diseases.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages12
Journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
Early online date9 Jun 2022
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 9 Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Funding: The authors acknowledge the support of the Academy of Finland
(grants No. 318281, 326204). This work has also been partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No.863214 - NEUROPA project, a
grant under the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation
No. 220 of 09 April 2010 (Agreement No. 075-15-2021-615 of 04 June
2021) and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian
Federation, within the framework of State support for the creation and
development of World-Class Research Centres, “Digital Biodesign and
Personalized Healthcare” No. 075-15-2020-926 and Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 19-32-90253. The collection of the
clinical data was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research
(RFBR), grant No. 20-08-01153. The processing of the data from the
heating test experiment was funded by the Russian Science Foundation,
grant No. 20-75-00123 (Corresponding author: Evgeny A. Zherebtsov)

Keywords

  • Biomedical measurement
  • Biomedical optical imaging
  • Blood
  • Blood flow
  • Diabetes Mellitus
  • Laser Doppler flowmetry
  • Optical scattering
  • Research and development
  • Skin
  • blood flow
  • microcirculation
  • optical Doppler effect
  • skin blood perfusion

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