Combined fluorescence and laser speckle contrast imaging system and applications of same

A non-transitory tangible computer-readable medium storing instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause a method for processing auto-fluorescence and LSCI images for intraoperative guidance in a surgery to be performed, wherein the a method comprising:

• cropping a background-subtracted auto-fluorescence image to remove first pixels on each edge;
• thresholding the cropped auto-fluorescence image into first, second and third intensity levels using a multiple thresholding scheme, wherein the first intensity level is corresponding to a low intensity background;
• setting the second intensity level equal to the low intensity background, resulting in an image having a distinction between the parathyroid gland of interest and everything else;
• filtering the resulted image using a two-dimensional Gaussian to locate a dominant cluster of points, wherein the dominant cluster of points is corresponding to the parathyroid gland;
• converting the filtered image to an edge map;
• and
• fitting an active contour model to the edge map to obtain the contour demarcating the parathyroid gland.