Naoki KONISHI, Yoshinori TOKIMOTO, Kazuhiro KOHRA and Hitoshi FUJII

Department of Computer Science and Electronics, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Fukuoka 820-8502, Japan

(Received January 23, 2002; Accepted May 8, 2002)

A new technique is developed to visualize the blood flow map of the human retina using laser speckle phenomena. Despite use of an ordinary CCD camera as the detector, the performance of laser speckle flowgraphy system for the analysis of ocular blood circulation is greatly improved to achieve higher resolution and a wider field of view for blood flow mapping. It is shown that the quality of the blood flow map is influenced by the sampling format of the pixel points in the space- and time-varying speckle field.

Key words: laser speckles, blood flowmetry, flow visualization, medical instruments