Abstract #2936

Skin blood flow functions as a potential proxy for cerebral blood flow in adults with sickle cell disease

Brijesh Kumar Yadav^1,2, Nicolas Currier³, Gersham Dent³, Paul S Swerdlow⁴, Indryas Woldie⁴, Muhammad Shahid⁴, Sean K Sethi⁵, Wenting Wang³, Kiarash Ghassaban⁵, Willem Birkhoff⁶, Jacobus Burggraaf⁶, Jaspert de Vries⁶, Jaladhar Neelavalli², William E. Hobbs⁷, E Mark Haacke^1,2, and Ajay Verma⁸

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States, ²Department of Radiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States, ³Biogen Inc., Cambridge, MA, United States, ⁴Department of Hematology-Oncology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States, ⁵MR Innovations, Detroit, MI, United States, ⁶Centre for Human Drug Research, Leiden, Netherlands, ⁷Bioverativ, a Sanofi company, Waltham, MA, United States, ⁸United Neuroscience, Hauppauge, NY, United States

Even though the prevalence of stroke in adults with sickle cell disease (SCD) is higher compared to children, no accepted screening measures are available for identifying adults with SCD at high risk for strokes. Despite cerebral blood flow (CBF) from transcranial Doppler being an established surrogate measure of stroke risk in children, it is not feasible in adults and MRI is uneconomical and inefficient for screening. We examined skin blood flow using laser speckle contrast imaging as a peripheral surrogate of CBF using MRI. Skin blood flow was highly correlated with CBF in sickle cell patients with excellent test-retest reliability.

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