High-speed laser speckle contrast imaging of the human retina
Abstract
We demonstrate real-time laser speckle contrast imaging of the human retina using a Phantom S980 streaming camera at 3840×2160 pixels, 8-bit depth, and 1000 frames per second, with a 988 μs exposure. We report four recordings of the peripapillary retina around the optic disc in the right eye of one healthy 25-year-old emmetropic man, acquired without pharmacological pupil dilation, using 852-nm diffuse Maxwellian illumination at an entering optical power of 5.0 mW. Each recording contained 4096 frames (4.10 s), and all 16384 frames in the reported recordings were retained. Open-source Holoflow software on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 computes K=σ/μ over 5×5 spatial pixels and nonoverlapping blocks of 16 frames, producing 62.5 contrast maps/s with 60-frame/s rendering and no additional averaging. The nominal raw-input throughput is 8.29 Gpixel/s. Main retinal arterial and venous branches and smaller peripapillary vessels were visualized. Variations during the cardiac cycle were visible in the principal retinal arteries and veins, as illustrated in the Supplementary Videos. Regional inverse-contrast traces show an arterial dicrotic notch and spontaneous venous pulsation. This single-volunteer demonstration establishes an operating point for high-throughput retinal speckle-contrast visualization. Physiological observations are descriptive; contrast is an instrument-dependent observable rather than a calibrated blood-flow velocity.
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BibTeX
@misc{auray2026highspeed,
title = {{High-speed laser speckle contrast imaging of the human retina}},
author = {Zacharie Auray and Jules Guillou and Basile Malbois and Maxime Boy-Arnould and Michael Atlan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.34605},
eprint = {2610.34605},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34605},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - High-speed laser speckle contrast imaging of the human retina
AU - Zacharie Auray
AU - Jules Guillou
AU - Basile Malbois
AU - Maxime Boy-Arnould
AU - Michael Atlan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.34605
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34605
AB - We demonstrate real-time laser speckle contrast imaging of the human retina using a Phantom S980 streaming camera at 3840×2160 pixels, 8-bit depth, and 1000 frames per second, with a 988 μs exposure. We report four recordings of the peripapillary retina around the optic disc in the right eye of one healthy 25-year-old emmetropic man, acquired without pharmacological pupil dilation, using 852-nm diffuse Maxwellian illumination at an entering optical power of 5.0 mW. Each recording contained 4096 frames (4.10 s), and all 16384 frames in the reported recordings were retained. Open-source Holoflow software on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 computes K=σ/μ over 5×5 spatial pixels and nonoverlapping blocks of 16 frames, producing 62.5 contrast maps/s with 60-frame/s rendering and no additional averaging. The nominal raw-input throughput is 8.29 Gpixel/s. Main retinal arterial and venous branches and smaller peripapillary vessels were visualized. Variations during the cardiac cycle were visible in the principal retinal arteries and veins, as illustrated in the Supplementary Videos. Regional inverse-contrast traces show an arterial dicrotic notch and spontaneous venous pulsation. This single-volunteer demonstration establishes an operating point for high-throughput retinal speckle-contrast visualization. Physiological observations are descriptive; contrast is an instrument-dependent observable rather than a calibrated blood-flow velocity.
ER -