In vivo time-domain diffuse correlation spectroscopy with a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector

Diffuse correlations spectroscopy (DCS) is a non-invasive optical technique that, studying the speckle intensity fluctuations of light diffused through a biological tissue, measures its microvascular blood flow. Typically, a long coherence length continuous wave source is used, which limits the possibility to resolve the photon path lengths. Recently, time-domain (TD) DCS was proposed, where a pulsed yet coherent light source is used to resolve the speckle fluctuations at different time-of-flights. Due to the constraint of single-speckle detection and time-resolved acquisition, the technique has a limited throughput which limits depth sensitivity. Here, we demonstrate TD DCS with a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD). The SNSPD has a high quantum efficiency and temporal resolution, while maintaining a very low background and no after-pulsing. We report results on phantom and in vivo experiments, which show the potentiality of the proposed detection system for highly accurate TD DCS experiments.