Abstract (300 words maximum)
Sickle cell disease (SCD) has a profound effect on the brain. In sub-Saharan Africa where most SCD patients (~75%) live and access to medical care is limited, ~11% of SCD children will develop a stroke by the age of 20. Although early identification is critical to treatment, transcranial doppler ultrasound (TCD), the standard screening tool, is not widely available in low-resource settings due to its high cost and need of trained personnel. Speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS) may provide a user-friendly and cost-effective solution to this unmet need. SCOS is an emerging optical technique that can quantify blood flow in deep tissues (> 0.5 cm) with an inexpensive instrumental cost. Traditionally, SCOS uses a near-infrared (NIR,700-900nm) light source and a CCD/CMOS array to detect variations in the spatial speckle patterns at the tissue surface that are caused by moving red blood cells. However, NIR SCOS suffers from an insufficient SNR for the noninvasive brain monitoring and the detected signals are significantly contaminated by the extracerebral layer contribution. Therefore, the project goal is to investigate the feasibility of an affordable SWIR SCOS system for assessing brain blood flow in deep tissues by performing a computational verification in comparison with the NIR SCOS system. From the basis of work done previously, instrumental noise factors will be added to the simulations, as well as a more realistic three-layered tissue model. Depth sensitivity at SWIR and NIR SCOS will be compared by assessing relative changes between extracted cerebral blood flow indices (BFI).
Academic department under which the project should be listed
SPCEET - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Paul (Seung Yup) Lee
Low-Cost Shortwave-Infrared Spectroscopy (SWIRS) for Stroke Risk Screening in Pediatric Sickle Cell Disease
Sickle cell disease (SCD) has a profound effect on the brain. In sub-Saharan Africa where most SCD patients (~75%) live and access to medical care is limited, ~11% of SCD children will develop a stroke by the age of 20. Although early identification is critical to treatment, transcranial doppler ultrasound (TCD), the standard screening tool, is not widely available in low-resource settings due to its high cost and need of trained personnel. Speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS) may provide a user-friendly and cost-effective solution to this unmet need. SCOS is an emerging optical technique that can quantify blood flow in deep tissues (> 0.5 cm) with an inexpensive instrumental cost. Traditionally, SCOS uses a near-infrared (NIR,700-900nm) light source and a CCD/CMOS array to detect variations in the spatial speckle patterns at the tissue surface that are caused by moving red blood cells. However, NIR SCOS suffers from an insufficient SNR for the noninvasive brain monitoring and the detected signals are significantly contaminated by the extracerebral layer contribution. Therefore, the project goal is to investigate the feasibility of an affordable SWIR SCOS system for assessing brain blood flow in deep tissues by performing a computational verification in comparison with the NIR SCOS system. From the basis of work done previously, instrumental noise factors will be added to the simulations, as well as a more realistic three-layered tissue model. Depth sensitivity at SWIR and NIR SCOS will be compared by assessing relative changes between extracted cerebral blood flow indices (BFI).