Blood coagulation is a complicated dynamic process that maintains the blood’s fluid state and prevents uncontrollable bleeding. The real-time monitoring of coagulation dynamics is critical for blood transfusion guidance, emergency management of trauma-induced coagulopathy, perioperative bleeding, and targeted hemostatic therapy. Here, we utilize optical vortex dynamics to detect the blood coagulation dynamic process in a rapid and non-contact manner. To characterize the temporal changes in viscoelastic properties of blood during coagulation, we track the stochastic motion of optical vortices in the time-varying speckles reflected from 100 blood samples with varied coagulation profiles. The mean square displacement (MSD) of the vortices increases nonlinearly with time lag during blood coagulation reminiscent of the particles in viscoelastic fluids. The MSD curves with coagulation time are similar to the tracings of thromboelastography (TEG) during the blood coagulation. The retrieved coagulation parameters, such as reaction time and activated clotting time measured using the optical vortex method, exhibit a close correlation to those parameters acquired from TEG. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the optical vortex method for monitoring blood coagulation at the point of care. Our method is also applicable to measuring the viscoelasticity of complex fluids and turbid soft matters.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.