Recipes for diffuse correlation spectroscopy instrument design using commonly utilized hardware based on targets for signal-to-noise ratio and precision

Lorenzo Cortese; Giuseppe Lo Presti; Marco Pagliazzi; Davide Contini; Alberto Dalla Mora; Hamid Dehghani; Fabio Ferri; Jonas B Fischer; Martina Giovannella; Fabrizio Martelli; Udo M Weigel; Stanislaw Wojtkiewicz; Marta Zanoletti; Turgut Durduran

doi:10.1364/BOE.423071

Recipes for diffuse correlation spectroscopy instrument design using commonly utilized hardware based on targets for signal-to-noise ratio and precision

Biomed Opt Express. 2021 May 11;12(6):3265-3281. doi: 10.1364/BOE.423071. eCollection 2021 Jun 1.

Authors

Lorenzo Cortese^{1

2}, Giuseppe Lo Presti^{1

2}, Marco Pagliazzi¹, Davide Contini³, Alberto Dalla Mora³, Hamid Dehghani⁴, Fabio Ferri⁵, Jonas B Fischer^{1

6}, Martina Giovannella¹, Fabrizio Martelli⁷, Udo M Weigel⁶, Stanislaw Wojtkiewicz⁴, Marta Zanoletti^{1

3}, Turgut Durduran^{1

8}

Affiliations

¹ ICFO-Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain.
² These authors equally contributed to this work. Authors are listed in alphabetical order except for the first three and the last.
³ Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Fisica, 20133 Milano, Italy.
⁴ University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
⁵ Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Dipartimento di Scienza e Alta Tecnologia and To. Sca. Lab., 22100 Como, Italy.
⁶ HemoPhotonics S.L., 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain.
⁷ Università degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Fisica, 50100 Firenze, Italy.
⁸ Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), 08015 Barcelona, Spain.

Abstract

Over the recent years, a typical implementation of diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) instrumentation has been adapted widely. However, there are no detailed and accepted recipes for designing such instrumentation to meet pre-defined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and precision targets. These require specific attention due to the subtleties of the DCS signals. Here, DCS experiments have been performed using liquid tissue simulating phantoms to study the effect of the detected photon count-rate, the number of parallel detection channels and the measurement duration on the precision and SNR to suggest scaling relations to be utilized for device design.