Effects of tissue surface curvature and incident light angle on diffuse correlation spectroscopy

Abstract

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy is an emerging technique for the continuous, non-invasive monitoring of blood flow in biological tissues. However, the influence of oblique incidence and surface curvature has not been fully discussed. In this paper, we study the effects of the incident angle and surface curvature on diffuse correlation spectroscopy measurement and the blood flow index (BFI). For semi-infinite plane with lower absorption, oblique incidence angle has slightly stronger influence. Larger incident angles lead to high values and a reduced decay rate of the normalized electric field temporal autocorrelation. When the radius of curvature is more than 10 cm, the BFI estimation error reduced to less than 5% and very close to semi-infinite plane case. Besides, for the surface with small radius of curvature, larger incident angles sometimes may cause smaller estimated errors of the BFI. This work may help improve BFI estimation accuracy from diffuse correlation spectroscopy.