Improvement of sensitivity in continuous wave near infra-red spectroscopy systems by using silicon photomultipliers.

We experimentally analyze the signal-to-noise ratio of continuous wave (CW) near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) reflectance systems based on light emitting diodes and silicon photomultipliers for high performance low cost NIRS biomedical systems. We show that under suitable experimental conditions such systems exhibit a high SNR, which allows an SDS of 7 cm, to our knowledge the largest ever demonstrated in a CW-NIRs system.