Project Title: Handheld laser speckle contrast imaging device for monitoring blood flow

Project Duration: May 21 – July 28 2018 (10 weeks), 40 hours per week.

Project Mentors:

• Primary Faculty Mentor (Name, Affiliation, website and Email/Phone):

Luke Mortensen, luke.mortensen@uga.edu

• Secondary Faculty Mentor (Name, Affiliation, website and Email/Phone):

Steve Stice

• Graduate Student/PostDoc mentors (Name, Affiliation and Email/Phone):

Kayvan Tehrani, Kayvan.tehrani@uga.edu

Project Description:

The goal of this project is to develop a handheld blood-flow monitoring device. Among many techniques for blood flow measurement is Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI). This method uses speckle patterns generated by propagation of light, and its contrast between scattering characteristic of blood flow and static tissue as metric for evaluation of flow. This method is important for many biological research applications such as stroke. In this project we would like to develop a handheld system that a researcher can easily move to the site of measurement. The system would be based on a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and we will develop Python programming language based software.

REU Student Role and Responsibility:

The student is responsible for programming and developing a graphical user interface that will allow the user to image both normal imaging and acquire LSCI images. The student will also work with final users of the system to make custom adjustments to the system.

Required skills or courses for the REU student:

Familiarity with programming languages and ability to make minor hardware changes to system is required.

Expected Outcome for REU student:

We anticipate the results of this project to be published in journals such as IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering.