This invention provides rapid determination of regional blood flow within a vessel over time. Building on our advances in adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy, we combine fast camera capture with high spatial resolution to resolve single blood cells moving within vessels of the eye. The invention provides a computational strategy to processes data in real-time to provide feedback to the instrument operator. Visual and numerical feedback in real-time provides a variety of ways to graphically visualize single blood cell speed, evaluate blood cell imaging signal quality and report dynamic changes associated with blood flow over time. The invention makes use of serial and parallel CPU and GPU computer processing architecture to further enhance the speed, precision and accuracy of the measurement. By performing real-time analysis, our invention permits a clinician, researcher or instrument operator to monitor changes in blood perfusion while the data is being acquired, thus removing a post-processing bottleneck. The fast implementation of analysis also allows for dense sampling of the data matrix to provide highly detailed maps of regional blood flow within the vessel to be analyzed quickly in post-processing.
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