Chicken embryo's heart rate measurements by laser imaging

The heart-rate may be important from point of view of development of whole organism and its metabolism, of circulation. Monitoring the vital signs, such as heart-rate and blood flow, of a developing chicken embryo is very useful at incubation stages for breeding programs. Especially for artificial incubation conditions, confirmation of fertilization and survival of eggs at early stage, are of practical importance. In this paper, an optical method based on laser speckle contrast analysis has been developed to monitor heart-rate values of chicken embryos at early incubation stage. With advantage of simplicity and efficiency of this method, it can be a proper and different from that of literature, for routine embryonic assessment. We can determine heart-rate value using speckle-contrast data from image sequence and Welch Spectral Analysis. It is shown that the proposed system can be used for heart-rate based monitoring of the embryonic development of fertilized chicken and other avian types.