Deep blood flow extraction for diffuse correlation spectroscopy at photon-starved regimes using SPAD arrays

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is an optical technique that allows for non-invasive measurements of tissue perfusion, and is often used for neuromonitoring applications. However, a major challenge of DCS is low SNR for deep tissue measurements. Recent works have demonstrated the potential for SPAD arrays to provide significant SNR increases by averaging autocorrelation signals from individual speckles. Such methods may still be suboptimal for efficient signal extraction, as the individual signals may each be low fidelity. In this work, we explore alternative methods of integrating parallelized DCS signals in low photon regimes for accurate blood flow estimation.