Diffused Correlation Spectroscopy for Measurement of Blood Perfusion During Low Level Laser Therapy (LLLT)

Abstract

Near infrared stimulation or Low Level Laser Therapy (LLLT) is an innovative technique shown to effect the microvasculature hemodynamics. The aim of this study is to use Diffused Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) to evaluate the physiological effects of LLLT on blood perfusion. This study is divided into two parts: the fist part is the development of DCS system and the second part is investigating the effects of LLLT on biological tissue. DCS is an emerging non-invasive technique to probe deep tissue hemodynamics. DCS uses time-averaged intensity autocorrelation function for the fluctuations caused due to the moving scatterers (RBCs) in biological tissue. We present a software based autocorrelator system to complete the acquisition and processing parts. We conducted validation studies on an intralipid phantom and human forearm. Both the studies proved smooth decay curves which help in getting a better curve fitting and as a result more accurate blood flow index (BFI). We show that the software based autocorrelation system can be an alternative to the conventional hardware based correlators in DCS systems with benefits such as flexibility in raw photon count data processing and low cost. The objective of the second part of this study is evaluating how a single session of LLLT alters the hemodynamics in the microvasculature. We performed an experiment where the subjects forearm was stimulated with LLLT and the corresponding changes were recorded using DCS system. The results obtained shows significant hemodynamic changes in response to LLLT with a 95%confidence interval. The results in this study indicate that LLLT could lead to the development of non-invasive technique to help in rehabilitation and performance-enhancing of healthy humans.