Speckle fluctuation spectroscopy of intracellular motion in living tissue using coherence-domain digital holography

Abstract

Dynamic speckle from 3-D coherence-gated optical sections provides a sensitive label-free measure of cellular activity up to 1 mm deep in living tissue. However, specificity to cellular functionality has not previously been demonstrated. In this work, we perform fluctuation spectroscopy on dynamic light scattering captured using coherence-domain digital holography to obtain the spectral response of tissue that is perturbed by temperature, osmolarity, and antimitotic cytoskeletal drugs. Different perturbations induce specific spectrogram response signatures that can show simultaneous enhancement and suppression in different spectral ranges.