Cutaneous Blood Flow, Doppler Measurement of

Abstract

The necessity for measuring the skin blood flows occurs in many areas of physiology, pharmacology, and clinical medicine. Although the measurement of blood flow in the large blood vessels in the human body has been performed for centuries, the use of techniques to explore microcirculation have just evolved over the past 30 years. Available tests for assessing the skin microcirculation include tissue pH measurement, radioactive isotope clearance, capillary microscopy, plethysmography, transcutaneous oxygen tension, ultrasonic Doppler flowmetry, and laser Doppler flowmetry.