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Laser Speckle Contrast Analysis (LASCA) has been proven to be a highly useful tool for the full-field determination of the blood perfusion of a variety of tissues. Some of the major advantages of this technique are its relatively high spatial and temporal resolution as well as its good or excellent accordance to Doppler systems. However, traditionally it is only able to report a single characteristic speed regarding to the actual range of interest. This might be misleading if multiple characteristic speeds are present (e. g. tremor and perfusion in skin) or if several kinds of tissues are mixed (e. g. parenchyma and vessels in brain). Here we present two relatively simple extensions of LASCA for these problems. The application of multiple autocorrelation functions (combined with the usage of multiple exposure times) can help in the separation of multiple characteristic speeds. We also present a useful method for the separation of information those originate from a mixture of different tissues. The latter method can be also implemented to single-exposure systems.

Laser Speckle Contrast Analysis (LASCA) was introduced in 1981. Since then, several enhancements were applied to it. Nowadays, the technique can provide relatively high accuracy as well as high temporal and spatial resolution during the examination of ocular or cerebral tissues. However, in the case of skin, the results are highly affected by the intensive scattering on the skin surface, as the scattering on the non-moving parts of the sample lead to the detrimental decrease of the accuracy. We present a LASCA method based on the use of multiple exposure times, combined with the switching-mode control of the light intensity and a special sampling technique to achieve near to real-time measurement of the skin perfusion. The system based on our method is able to automatically handle the destructive effect of the skin surface and re-tune itself according to the changes of the sample, while it provides full-field perfusion maps with high accuracy, without the need of any precalibrations.