Echo speckle imaging of dynamic processes in soft materials

We present a laser-speckle imaging technique, termed Echo speckle imaging (ESI), that quantifies the local dynamics in biological tissue and soft materials with a noise level around or below 10% of the measured signal without affecting the spatial resolution. We achieve this through an unconventional speckle beam illumination that creates changing, statistically independent illumination conditions and substantially increases the measurement accuracy. Control experiments for dynamically homogeneous and heterogeneous soft materials and tissue phantoms illustrate the performance of the method. We show that this approach enables us to precision-monitor purely dynamic heterogeneities in turbid soft media with a lateral resolution of 100 µm and better.