Effect of modulation frequency bandwidth on measurement accuracy and precision for digital diffuse optical spectroscopy (dDOS)

Abstract

Near-infrared (NIR) frequency-domain Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy (DOS) is an emerging technology with a growing number of potential clinical applications. In an effort to reduce DOS system complexity and improve portability, we recently demonstrated a direct digital sampling method that utilizes digital signal generation and detection as a replacement for more traditional analog methods. In our technique, a fast analog-to-digital converter (ADC) samples the detected time-domain radio frequency (RF) waveforms at each modulation frequency in a broad-bandwidth sweep (50- 300MHz). While we have shown this method provides comparable results to other DOS technologies, the process is data intensive as digital samples must be stored and processed for each modulation frequency and wavelength. We explore here the effect of reducing the modulation frequency bandwidth on the accuracy and precision of extracted optical properties. To accomplish this, the performance of the digital DOS (dDOS) system was compared to a gold standard network analyzer based DOS system. With a starting frequency of 50MHz, the input signal of the dDOS system was swept to 100, 150, 250, or 300MHz in 4MHz increments and results were compared to full 50-300MHz networkanalyzer DOS measurements. The average errors in extracted μ a and μ s ' with dDOS were lowest for the full 50-300MHz sweep (less than 3%) and were within 3.8% for frequency bandwidths as narrow as 50-150MHz. The errors increased to as much as 9.0% when a bandwidth of 50-100MHz was tested. These results demonstrate the possibility for reduced data collection with dDOS without critical compensation of optical property extraction.