title: Impact of temporal resolution on estimating capillary RBC-flux with optical coherence tomography.
abstract: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been used to measure capillary red blood cell (RBC) flux. However, one important technical issue is that the accuracy of this method is subject to the temporal resolution ( ? t ) of the repeated RBC-passage B-scans. A ceiling effect arises due to an insufficient ? t limiting the maximum RBC-flux that can be measured. In this letter, we first present simulations demonstrating that ? t = 1.5 ?? ms permits measuring RBC-flux up to 150 ?? RBCs / s with an underestimation of 9%. The simulations further show that measurements with ? t = 3 and 4.5 ms provide relatively less accurate estimates for typical physiological fluxes. We provide experimental data confirming the simulation results showing that reduced temporal resolution (i.e., a longer ? t ) results in an underestimation of mean flux and compresses the distribution of measured fluxes, which potentially confounds physiological interpretation of the results. The results also apply to RBC-passage measurements made with confocal and two-photon microscopy for estimating capillary RBC-flux.
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Optics Division, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: Baoqiang
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Optics Division, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United StatesbMassachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Optics Division, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: Buyin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: Ruopeng
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Optics Division, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: Sava
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sakadžic
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Optics Division, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, United States.
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Boas
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002196:Capillaries / Q000502:physiology*; D004912:Erythrocytes / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods; D012039:Regional Blood Flow / Q000502:physiology; D041623:Tomography, Optical Coherence