Contribution of Speckle Noise in Near Infrared Spectroscopy Measurements

Key Researchers: Antonio Ortega-Martinez, BU; David Boas, BU

Summary: Current theoretical estimations of SNR involves shot noise and source power fluctuations but not speckle noise. Speckles manifest as fluctuations of the optical power received at the detector caused by interference of the multiple random paths taken by photons in tissue. We worked on a new model for the NIRS signal to noise ratio that includes the effects of speckle. We found that at short source-detector separation, speckle contributes a significant amount of additional noise when using long coherence length sources

Publications: Ortega-Martinez et al., JBO, 2019

Funding: Facebook’s Sponsored Academic Research Agreement and in part by NIH R24-NS104096 and R01-EB025145.