Functional imaging in photorefractive tissue speckle holography

Cellular motion produces highly dynamic speckle in wide-field depth-gated holographic optical coherence imaging. The speckle provides cell scale information such as cell membrane and organelle motion, even though the spatial resolution of the optics is above the cell scale. The statistical properties of dynamic speckle can be used for functional imaging of motile activity at depth within tissue. In this paper we develop a motility metric using time autocorrelation to create a three-dimensional motility map of tissue. The effect of noise and the shimmering showerglass effect in functional optical coherence imaging are evaluated quantitatively, and we demonstrate that meaningful motility information can be extracted from functional imaging using dynamic speckle.