Data Compression Scheme Facilitates Measurement of Blood Flow to the Brain

Healthcare

Data Compression Scheme Facilitates Measurement of Blood Flow to the Brain

SPIE, May 8, 2023

A data compression scheme developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Edinburgh allows most calculations involving single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) data to be performed directly on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This paves the way for improvements in multispeckle diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) techniques to better measure blood flow to the brain. The researchers connected a 192-by-128-pixel SPAD sensor array, packaged into the Quanticam camera module, to an FPGA and applied an autocorrelation algorithm. This allowed the computational burden of calculating autocorrelations to be shifted from the host computing system to the hardware linked directly to the SPAD sensors. University of Edinburgh's Robert K. Henderson said, "Our proposed system achieved a significant gain in the signal-to-noise ratio, which is 110 times higher than that possible on a single-speckle DSC implementation and three times higher than other state-of-the-art multispeckle DSC systems."