Recipes for diffuse correlation spectroscopy instrument design using commonly utilized hardware based on targets for signal-to-noise ratio and precision
Lorenzo Cortese, Giuseppe Lo Presti, Marco Pagliazzi, Davide Contini, Alberto Dalla Mora, Hamid Dehghani, F. Ferri, Jonas Fischer, Martina Giovannella, Fabrizio Martelli, Udo M. Weigel, Stanisław Wojtkiewicz, Marta Zanoletti, Turgut Durduran
Abstract
Over the recent years, a typical implementation of diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) instrumentation has been adapted widely. However, there are no detailed and accepted recipes for designing such instrumentation to meet pre-defined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and precision targets. These require specific attention due to the subtleties of the DCS signals. Here, DCS experiments have been performed using liquid tissue simulating phantoms to study the effect of the detected photon count-rate, the number of parallel detection channels and the measurement duration on the precision and SNR to suggest scaling relations to be utilized for device design.