Experimental Validation of Microvasculature Blood Flow Modeling by Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is an emerging technology to monitor the blood flow at microvasculature level, wherein the flow model is dependent on the movements of red blood cells (RBCs). To elucidate the mechanism of flow model, in this paper, we conducted the phantom experiments to simulate the blood flow environment in the microvessels. Meanwhile, the light temporal autocorrelation curves were collected by the DCS flowmetry. Through investigating the relationship between the DCS curves and the analytical-solution curves fitted by the three models, we established a hybrid flow model combining the Brownian motion and random ballistic flow. This innovative flow model, when combined with DCS data, will provide realistic blood flow measurements that help early diagnosis and treatment evaluation for a variety of diseases.