Skin temperature oscillation model for assessing vasomotion of microcirculation

It has been proved that there exists a certain correlation between fingertip temperature oscillations and blood flow oscillations. In this work, a porous media model of human hand is presented to investigate how the blood flow oscillation in the endothelial frequency band influences fingertip skin temperature oscillations. The porosity which represents the density of micro vessels is assumed to vary periodically and is a function of the skin temperature. Finite element analysis of skin temperature for a contra lateral hand under a cooling test was conducted. Subsequently, wavelet analysis was carried out to extract the temperature oscillations of the data through the numerical analysis and experimental measurements. Furthermore, the oscillations extracted from both numerical analyses and experiments were statistically analyzed to compare the amplitude. The simulation and experimental results show that for the subjects in cardiovascular health, the skin temperature fluctuations in endothelial frequency decrease during the cooling test and increase gradually after cooling, implying that the assumed porosity variation can represent the vasomotion in the endothelial frequency band.