SIGNIFICANCE

Bedside cerebral blood flow (CBF) monitoring has the potential to inform and improve care for acute neurologic diseases, but technical challenges limit the use of existing techniques in clinical practice.

AIM

Here, we validate the Openwater optical system, a novel wearable headset that uses laser speckle contrast to monitor microvascular hemodynamics.

APPROACH

We monitored 25 healthy adults with the Openwater system and concurrent transcranial Doppler (TCD) while performing a breath-hold maneuver to increase CBF. Relative blood flow (rBF) was derived from changes in speckle contrast, and relative blood volume (rBV) was derived from changes in speckle average intensity.

RESULTS

A strong correlation was observed between beat-to-beat optical rBF and TCD-measured cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFv), ; the slope of the linear fit indicates good agreement, 0.87 (95% CI: 0.83 ). Beat-to-beat rBV and CBFv were also strongly correlated, , but as expected the two variables were not proportional; changes in rBV were smaller than CBFv changes, with linear fit slope of 0.18 (95% CI: 0.17 to 0.19). Further, strong agreement was found between rBF and CBFv waveform morphology and related metrics.

CONCLUSIONS

This first validation of the Openwater optical system highlights its potential as a cerebral hemodynamic monitor, but additional validation is needed in disease states.