Design of a miniaturized frequency domain near infrared spectrometer with validation in solid phantoms and human tissue

Hemoglobin is one of the most important chromophores in the human body, since oxygen is carried to the tissue by binding with the hemoglobin. Therefore measuring the concentrations of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (HbR) is very important in both clinical settings and academic fields. Frequency domain near infrared spectroscopy (fdNIR spectroscopy) is a technique that can be used to measure the absolute concentrations of HbO and HbR non-invasively and locally. The fdNIR spectrometer utilizes the attenuation and the phase shift (with respect to the source) that an intensity modulated NIR light experiences in order to calculate the absorption (μa) and reduced scattering (μ′s) coefficient of the tissue. In this work, a miniaturized dual-wavelength fdNIR spectrometry instrument is presented with both tissue-like phantom and in vivo occlusion measurements. Systematic tests were performed on tissue phantoms to quantify the accuracy and stability of the instrument. The absolute errors for μa and μ′s were below 15% respectively. The amplitude and phase uncertainty were below 0.25% and 0.35°. In vivo measurements were also conducted to further validate the system.