Ultra-low-illumination, high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring of cerebral perfusion via deep learning-enhanced laser speckle contrast imaging

Abstract

Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) is a non-contact, label-free optical technique widely used in biomedical research and clinical applications. It enables real-time visualization and quantification of microvascular blood flow by analyzing the temporal fluctuations of laser speckles induced by moving red blood cells. However, conventional LSCI uses visible or near-infrared illumination, which--during prolonged exposure (e.g., >1{square}hr)--can induce sublethal neural stress and cause signal drift, compromising physiological relevance and raising ethical concerns. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce TunLSCI--a TransUNet-based recovery network designed to reconstruct high-fidelity mouse cerebral blood flow (CBF) indices from ultra-low-illumination LSCI. We train our network on paired ultra-low-illumination (1.27 {micro}W/mm2) and conventional LSCI data ([~]200 {micro}W/mm2 illumination, the latter as reference), and demonstrate that it outperforms the conventional standard analytical LSCI processing pipeline based on stLASCA, particularly in reconstructing fine vasculature from few frames, suppressing speckle noise, and maintaining robustness against exposure variations. We validate that the proposed TunLSCI reduces illumination power density by [~]157-fold compared with conventional stLASCA, well below the safety threshold for cortical exposure in mice and markedly improves stability during a 2-hour continuous mouse CBF monitoring. Our method significantly minimizes the phototoxic burden of LSCI while preserving spatiotemporal fidelity and quantitative accuracy, thus enabling longitudinal, high-biosafety cerebral perfusion tracking in vivo over multi-hours.