Spatial speckle correlometry in applications to tissue structure monitoring

Abstract

Asymptotic behavior of temporal autocorrelation functions of speckle intensity fluctuations induced by tissue scanning with a focused probe beam is experimentally studied for the transition from a single-scattering to a multiple-scattering mode. Such parameters as the exponential factor (or the Hurst coefficient) and the Hausdo dimension are proposed for the characterization and the visualization of the variations of the studied tissues' optical properties in generalized form. We studied reversible transition between various scattering modes stimulated by the application of certain chemical agents to the human sclera samples using speckle intensity correlation analysis; corresponding results are presented. The possibilities of the scattering structures imaging with local estimations of the exponential factor of speckle intensity fluctuations are shown in in vitro experiments with samples of human skin epidermis.