Fast and sensitive diffuse correlation spectroscopy with highly parallelized single photon detection

Abstract

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is a well-established method that measures rapid changes in scattered coherent light to identify blood flow and functional dynamics within a tissue. While its sensitivity to minute scatterer displacements leads to a number of unique advantages, conventional DCS systems become photon-limited when attempting to probe deep into the tissue, which leads to long measurement windows (∽1 sec). Here, we present a high-sensitivity DCS system with 1024 parallel detection channels integrated within a single-photon avalanche diode array and demonstrate the ability to detect mm-scale perturbations up to 1 cm deep within a tissue-like phantom at up to a 33 Hz sampling rate. We also show that this highly parallelized strategy can measure the human pulse at high fidelity and detect behaviorally induced physiological variations from above the human prefrontal cortex. By greatly improving the detection sensitivity and speed, highly parallelized DCS opens up new experiments for high-speed biological signal measurement.