Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy

Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) uses clear near-infrared light to penetrate deep tissue and measure diffuse light spot variations sensitive to tissue motions in red blood cells.DCS offers a compact, non-invasive, and affordable option for microvascular blood flow measurements and has been validated against other criteria including the power spectral Doppler ultrasound, Doppler ultrasound, laser Doppler flowmetry, Xenon computed tomography, fluorescent microsphere flow measurement and ASL-MRI. The DCS technology has been widely incorporated into various tissues including brain, tumor, and skeletal muscle. DCS implementations have been previously studied in brain and tumor. Interested readers are encouraged to read these publications for details. This review paper will concentrate on incorporating some recent developments of DCS in skeletal muscle research. A DCS flow-meter 's key components include a long laser coherence length at NIR range, a single-photon counting avalanche photodiode (APD) detector, and an autocorrelator board. Other elements, such as source / detector fibres, device, and A / D board, are used to couple tissue light or optical data control / record. For the measurement of tissue blood flow, the laser mounted on the tissue surface ( e.g., skin) launches long-coherence NIR light into the tissue through a multi-mode source fiber, and the light transported / scattered through the tissue was obtained from the source fiber by a single-mode (or a few-mode) detector fiber mounted in millimeters to centimetres.