Advanced non-invasive photonic methods for functional monitoring of haemodynamics and vasomotor regulation in health and diseases

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Background

Today versatility of non-invasive photonic techniques has been developed to measure real-time characteristics of haemodynamics and microvascular system in health and pathology conditions in different organs and tissues. Compact laser instruments for near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), Laser Doppler Flowmetry (LDF), diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), NIRS flow oximetry, Raman spectroscopy, and others are used now for non-invasive rapid measurement of different parameters of haemocirculation such as blood flow, mean arterial pressure, oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin concentrations and others. Development and introduction of these methods to clinic lead to step-by-step substitution of laboratory analysis and enable bed-side diagnostics.

Design of hybrid optical techniques and their combination with imaging tissues and organs by optical coherence tomography allows measuring dynamic characteristics of complex functionality and regulation of microvascular systems in health and pathology. Today photonic methods become a powerful tool to study dynamical processes such as vascular tone auto-regulation and functional hyperaemia which are controlled by vessel vasculature and different regulatory signals released from surrounding tissue and organs (brain, muscle and others). Using a combination of compact laser sources and spectral filtering of LDF data makes possible to evaluate both micro-haemocirculation and micro-lymphatic flow. Promising is a study of the physiological link between blood flow and metabolism when combining LDF and fluorescent diagnostics. Spectral analysis of different optical data streams provides valuable information on neurovascular and vascular-skeletal muscles coupling – auto-regulation mechanism of increased blood flow under conditions of intense neuronal or muscular activity. Desynchronization of cerebral haemodynamics changes and uncoupling between the neurophysiological response and cerebral haemodynamics have been demonstrated relating to malfunction in vasomotor response and can play a key role in the disease development such as stroke physiopathology. The importance of haemodynamic factors in such physiopathology as ischemic stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, cancer and others is well established. Early detection of the impairment of cerebrovascular auto-regulation and reactivity by non-invasive optical methods may become a potential tool for early diagnostic and treatment. Applications of the non-invasive optical methods to drug therapy aim at real time tracking of the different responses in haemodynamics and vasculature tone to the different drug therapies (anticoagulant, NSAID, angiotensin, diabetic, and others therapies) in various cohorts of patients that can facilitate a personalized medicine.

The current development of the photonic equipment for clinical applications aims at establishing disease-specific diagnostic criteria when optical signals after processing and analysis could be easily interpreted for clinicians in medical terms. At designing laser techniques, a vast of in vitro optical experimental data on vascular regulation at molecular, cellular, and tissue levels can be analysed and used for developing distinctive optic fingerprints of the diseases. As integrative approach in this R&D, computational systems physiology and neurophysiology of microvascular dynamics is employed to interpret in vivo data on the molecular level of disease. In the proposed research topic we review the cutting-edge applications of non-invasive photonic methods in biomedicine and seek to bring together the state-of-art methods allowing translating patient-specific optical data arrays generated by these techniques to distinct diagnosis.

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