Combined electro-optical imaging for the time evolution of white thrombus growth in artificial capillaries

We present a novel methodology to measure white thrombus volume growth in an artificial microchannel, where whole blood flows. We designed a sensor consisting of a poly-dimethyl-siloxane microchannel and parallel gold electrodes sputtered on the surface of a slide, where induced hemostasis takes place. A novel inversion methodology, based on optical and electrical impedance data simultaneously processed, allows reconstructing the thrombus volume. The advantage of the proposed methodology is to reconstruct the evolution of the thrombus volume as a function of time; this is not possible with the present state of the art optical imaging based on confocal microscopy, which provides the thrombus volume estimation only at the end of the process.