Blood flowing state analysis in outflow tract of chick embryonic heart based on spectral domain optical coherence tomography

The cardiac development is a complicated process affected by genetic and environmental factors. Wall shear stress (WSS) and periodic stress (WPS) are the components which have been proved to influence the morphogenesis during early stages of cardiac development. The vessel wall will be deformed by the blood pressure and produce natural elastic force acting on the blood. Because blood flowing in different flow state and show different characteristics of fluid, which influence the calculation of WSS and WPS directly, it is necessary to study the blood flow state. In this paper, we introduce a method to quantify the blood flowing state of early stage chick embryonic heart based on high speed spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT).4D (x,y,z,t) scan was performed on the outflow tract ( OFT) of HH18 (similar to 3 days of incubation) chick embryonic heart. By processing the structural image, the geometric parameters were obtained. Blood flow velocity distribution in the OFT were calculated by Doppler OCT method. Hemodynamic parameters were obtained at different times during the cardiac cycle used biofluid mechanics theory, such as Reynolds number and Womersley number.