Abstract
SIGNIFICANCE: Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is a powerful, noninvasive optical technique for measuring blood flow. Traditionally the blood flow index (BFi) is derived through nonlinear least-square fitting the measured intensity autocorrelation function (ACF). However, the fitting process is computationally intensive, susceptible to measurement noise, and easily influenced by optical properties (absorption coefficient μa and reduced scattering coefficient μs') and scalp and skull thicknesses. AIM: We aim to develop a data-driven method that enables rapid and robust analysis of multiple-scattered light's temporal ACFs. Moreover, the proposed method can be applied to a range of source-detector distances instead of being limited to a specific source-detector distance. APPROACH: We present a deep learning architecture with one-dimensional convolution neural networks, called DCS neural network (DCS-NET), for BFi and coherent factor (β) estimation. This DCS-NET was performed using simulated DCS data based on a three-layer brain model. We quantified the impact from physiologically relevant optical property variations, layer thicknesses, realistic noise levels, and multiple source-detector distances (5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 mm) on BFi and β estimations among DCS-NET, semi-infinite, and three-layer fitting models. RESULTS: DCS-NET shows a much faster analysis speed, around 17,000-fold and 32-fold faster than the traditional three-layer and semi-infinite models, respectively. It offers higher intrinsic sensitivity to deep tissues compared with fitting methods. DCS-NET shows excellent anti-noise features and is less sensitive to variations of μa and μs' at a source-detector separation of 30 mm. Also, we have demonstrated that relative BFi (rBFi) can be extracted by DCS-NET with a much lower error of 8.35%. By contrast, the semi-infinite and three-layer fitting models result in significant errors in rBFi of 43.76% and 19.66%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: DCS-NET can robustly quantify blood flow measurements at considerable source-detector distances, corresponding to much deeper biological tissues. It has excellent potential for hardware implementation, promising continuous real-time blood flow measurements.