I am from Libya and am in the second year of my PhD within the biomedical physics group. As peripheral blood vessels play a vital role in the cardiovascular system, my PhD research is to visualize the high speed vasomotion phenomena in vivo for the first time by using Spectral Radar Optical Coherence Tomography (SROCT) in order to investigate the oscillations of blood vessels and their relation to other cardiovascular function.

Why SROCT? Because it has become a prominent biomedical tissue imaging technique which can simultaneously provide tissue structure, blood perfusion, birefringence, and other physiological information that has a great potential for basic biomedical research and clinical medicine.

First we developed our technique using a ‘phantom’ (a model of a human arm) to mimic the scattering properties of human tissue and blood vessels. Then we moved on to capture an in vivo image of human skin and make a movie of vessels’ oscillations. This was produced from sequential SROCT imaging and Matlab Imaging Processing.