KAIST "3D High-Speed Imaging of Blood Cells Without Contrast Agents"

An imaging technology capable of obtaining hemodynamic information without using contrast agents has been developed for the first time in the world by a domestic research team.

Various hemodynamic information of blood flow moving through microvessels in vivo is mainly used to check the health status of the organs through which the blood flows. For the same reason, accurate measurement and analysis of hemodynamic information have played an important role in disease research.

Until now, to obtain hemodynamic information, methods such as measuring other values correlated with blood flow velocity and indirectly inferring it, or imaging after fluorescent staining of some blood cells, have been mainly used. The need for contrast agents was no different.

However, with the development of technology that can directly image blood cells flowing in blood vessels with high temporal resolution, it is expected that in the future, hemodynamic information can be obtained without using contrast agents.

The imaging results obtained using the technology developed by Professor Oh Wang-yeol's research team. Figure A shows red blood cells inside the blood vessels, Figure B depicts the interior of the blood vessels obtained by imaging red blood cells flowing within the vessels, and Figure C represents blood flow velocity and the number of red blood cells moving per hour, respectively. Provided by KAIST

According to KAIST on the 1st, recently, Professor Wang-Yeol Oh’s research team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and KI Health Science Institute developed a technology that images blood cells at high speed without contrast agents inside complex three-dimensional vascular structures.

The developed technology is notable in that it can image blood cells moving inside the body through blood vessels at a high speed of 1,450 frames per second without using external substances such as fluorescent contrast agents.

In particular, the research team succeeded in developing an image processing method devised by utilizing the characteristics of flowing blood cells to visualize only the flowing blood cells in microscopic images.

They also prevented blood cells from becoming invisible due to speckle noise by using spatially uncorrelated illumination, and by using a camera (high photon count) capable of acquiring pixels simultaneously at high speed, they enabled imaging of blood cells deep inside the body at high speed.

Professor Wang-Yeol Oh said, “Hemodynamic information is very important in biomedical research using living organisms, and extensive research has been conducted worldwide for a long time. The newly developed technology has the advantage of directly visualizing blood cells at high speed in multiple blood vessels without injecting fluorescent contrast agents into the body.”

He added, “This technology is convenient to use and can obtain accurate hemodynamic information immediately, so it is expected to be useful in the field as well.”

Meanwhile, this research, in which KAIST students Kyunghwan Kim and Hyunsang Park participated as co-first authors, was published in the October issue of the interdisciplinary research journal Small.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.