Degradation of signal-to-noise ratio due to turbulence in various biological tissues

Abstract

When a biological tissue is excited by an optical beam, the presence of turbulence in the tissue causes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to degrade. This degradation is in reference to the SNR value in the absence of tissue turbulence. The effect of tissue turbulence in reducing the SNR is examined. SNR reductions are examined for various types of biological tissues such as liver parenchyma (mouse), intestinal epithelium (mouse), upper dermis (human). Also, SNR reductions in the turbulent tissue are evaluated against the changes in the strength coefficient of the refractive-index fluctuations, fractal dimension, characteristic length of heterogeneity, small length-scale factor, tissue length, wavelength and the source size.