Dynamic analysis of mental sweating of eccrine sweat glands for various sound stimulus by optical coherence tomography

We demonstrate dynamic analysis of mental sweating of a few tens of eccrine sweat glands on a human fingertip by optical coherence tomography. We propose a novel method for evaluation of the amount of excess sweat in response to mental stress, where the en-face OCT images of the spiral lumen of the eccrine sweat gland are constructed by data acquisition of the 128 B-mode OCT images. The dynamic analysis of mental sweating is performed by the time-sequential piled-up en-face OCT images with the frame spacing of 3.3 sec. It is found that the amount of sweat in eccrine sweat glands is significantly increased in proportion to the strength of the sound stimulus.