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10.1 Introduction
Microvascular blood ow (BF) delivers nutrients such as oxygen
(O
2
) to tissue and removes metabolic by-products from tissue.
Normal microvascular BF is thus critical for tissue function.
Abnormal BF is associated with conditions such as cardiovas-
cular disease, stroke, head trauma, peripheral arterial disease
(PAD), and cancer (Yu et al. 2005a, b, 2006, Durduran et al.
2009b, Zhou et al. 2009). erefore, measurement of BF holds
potential to provide useful information for diagnosis of tissue
disease and for monitoring therapeutic eects.
e ideal BF measurement should provide quantitative
information about ...