Portable, high speed blood flow measurements enabled by long wavelength, interferometric diffuse correlation spectroscopy (LW-iDCS)

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is an optical technique that can be used to characterize blood flow in tissue. The measurement of cerebral hemodynamics has arisen as a promising use case for DCS, though traditional implementations of DCS exhibit suboptimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and cerebral sensitivity to make robust measurements of cerebral blood flow in adults. In this work, we present long wavelength, interferometric DCS (LW-iDCS), which combines the use of a longer illumination wavelength (1064 nm), multi-speckle, and interferometric detection, to improve both cerebral sensitivity and SNR. Through direct comparison with long wavelength DCS based on superconducting nanowire single photon detectors, we demonstrate an approximate 5× improvement in SNR over a single channel of LW-DCS in the measured blood flow signals in human subjects. We show equivalence of extracted blood flow between LW-DCS and LW-iDCS, and demonstrate the feasibility of LW-iDCS measured at 100 Hz at a source-detector separation of 3.5 cm. This improvement in performance has the potential to enable robust measurement of cerebral hemodynamics and unlock novel use cases for diffuse correlation spectroscopy.