Measurement of Whole Blood Coagulation Time by Laser Speckle Pattern Correlation

We present here the results obtained by correlation analysis of digital speckle patterns to assess coagulation time in citrated whole blood. The spread of coagulation time values in experiments was no more than 25% for an essentially healthy cohort of laboratory animals. Studies of normal and pathological plasma showed that the method is able to detect pathological hemostasis. The ability to create a new universal optical coagulometer analyzing citrated and native blood, as well as whole blood, is discussed. Estimation of citrated blood clotting time is an intermediate stage in developing a test for native blood.