A portable Zynq SoC-based diffuse correlation spectroscopy system for real-time blood flow monitoring

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is a powerful optical technique for non-invasive quantification of deep-tissue microvascular blood flow quantification. Conventional DCS systems are bulky and rely on external computing devices, limiting their point-of-care applicability. In this study, we implemented the proposed DCS system on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 system-on-chip (SoC) via hardware-software co-design approach. The proposed approach employed the programmable logic (PL) for a multi-tau digital autocorrelator and the processing system (PS) for real-time blood flow index (BFI) extraction via the Nelder-Mead algorithm. Arterial occlusion and breath-holding in vivo tests demonstrated strong consistency and high correlation with a conventional PC-based DCS system. Additionally, the proposed system significantly reduces instrumentation size and cost, enabling portable assessment of tissue microcirculation.