Comparative validation of speckle contrast optical spectroscopy against diffuse correlation spectroscopy for monitoring human cerebral blood flow.

Overview

1. Massachusetts General Hospital, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
2. Boston University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts, United States

Abstract

Significance: Within diffuse optics, speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS) has emerged as a promising alternative to the state-of-the-art technique of diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) for continuous, noninvasive bedside monitoring of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Although the two methods theoretically yield equivalent relative indices of CBF (rCBFi), in practice, SCOS-based measurements require experimental calibration to obtain unbiased rCBFi values. To date, there are limited validation studies comparing SCOS and DCS in human subjects, particularly at long source–detector separations (SDS) relevant to adult brain monitoring.

Aim: We aim to compare rCBFi from SCOS and DCS during concurrent, colocalized measurements on tissue-mimicking phantoms and humans at a large SDS of 3 cm.

Approach: We conducted concurrent SCOS and DCS measurements on temperature-ramped, two-layer, and flow phantoms, respectively. We also conducted concurrent CBF measurements on 10 healthy volunteers undergoing various physiological challenges (breath-holding, hyperventilation, pressure modulation, and squatting) designed to elicit measurable changes in blood flow. SCOS and DCS operated from a shared pulsed laser source, which enabled pulsation-resolved human CBF measurements at 3 cm SDS (DCS necessitated the use of cardiac-gated averaging).

Results: We observed strong agreement (r=0.93, slope = 0.98) between SCOS- and DCS-derived rCBFi at 3 cm SDS and an order-of-magnitude improvement in SCOS noise performance relative to DCS during the in vivo measurements. Phantom experiments showed a small depth-sensitivity disadvantage for SCOS at the same SDS; however, this was far outweighed by its superior noise performance, yielding an order-of-magnitude improvement in SCOS contrast-to-noise ratio.

Conclusions: The results demonstrate the equivalence of properly calibrated SCOS and DCS rCBFi measurements at long SDS in adults, establishing SCOS as a viable alternative to DCS for monitoring CBF. Further validation across larger cohorts and clinical populations is warranted.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

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Data

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• doi:10.7910/dvn/2e40fl — at the source; found in DataCite

Code and Data Availability

Code, data, and 3D CAD designs used to produce the results in the main and supplementary figures are available on Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2E40FL).92 All other data that support the reported findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 29 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 12 authors, 5 keywords, 2 funders, 88 references.

Cite

This paper

Cheng, T. Y., Robinson, M. B., Renna, M., Wu, K.-C., Starkweather, Z., Kierul, O. S., Kim, B. (., Howard, A. C., Boas, D. A., Carp, S. A., Cheng, X., & Franceschini, M. A. (2026). Comparative validation of speckle contrast optical spectroscopy against diffuse correlation spectroscopy for monitoring human cerebral blood flow. Neurophotonics, 13(2), 025008. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.nph.13.2.025008

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