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By irradiation of the skin with a diode laser the blood flow can be measured using the back scattered light. The majority of the back scattered light is scattered from fixed cells, but a small amount is scattered from moving erythrocytes and is Doppler shifted. The mixed light detected with a photodiode leads directly to a photocurrent proportional to the Doppler signal. A laser Doppler blood flow meter was developed, consisting of a PC-AT (66 MHz), a commercial A/D card (14 bit, 100 kHz) and a special head control card for two laser heads. The heads have a diameter of 35 mm and a height of 15 mm. The heads are fixed to the skin with tape. A DOS-Pascal software program provides the measurement, the calculation of a whole blood flow spectrum and shows the results on the screen with a time resolution of up to 50 Hz. The laser head is connected via 2 m cables with the head control card and contains a diode laser (5 mW, 670, 785 nm) a micro lens, two photodiodes and a pre-amplifier. On the head control card there is the current supply for the laser diodes, also the Doppler signals are band passed (400 Hz to 50 kHz), further amplified and fed into the A/D card. On the A/D card the analog signal is sampled with 100 kHz and digitized with 14 bit resolution. With 256 samples a frequency spectrum (128 channels, 0-50 kHz) is calculated by a FFT, but only the first 100 channels (0-39 kHz) are used to prevent ghosts. The measurements of the Doppler signal of the two laser heads need 5.2 ms and for all software calculations 15 ms are necessary. A quantitative recalculation of a velocity spectrum from the frequency spectrum is only possible if the velocity-, the irradiation-, and scattering-directions are known. In skin the small blood vessels have various directions and because of scattering in skin the irradiation of an erythrocyte can be assumed to be random. With this assumption of a random direction distribution a velocity spectrum can be calculated from the frequency spectrum. A flow spectrum is defined as the product of the velocity and the intensity at this velocity. The flow is defined as the integral over a given region of the flow spectrum. Four independent flow curves can be shown simultaneously on the screen and the frequency region for each flow can be set independently. The flows from low (1-3 mm/s) and high (7-9 mm/s) velocities show a different behavior and give the possibility to distinguish between the flow in the micro capillaries and larger vessels in the skin.
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