Abstract

We assess the data quality of calculated tissue oxygen saturation (SO₂) and haemoglobin concentrations recorded on muscle during an incremental cycling protocol in healthy volunteers. The protocol was repeated three times at the same day and a fourth time at a different day to estimate the reproducibility of the method. A novel broad-band, spatially resolved spectrometer (SRS) system was employed which allowed us to compare SRS–based oxygenation parameters with modified Lambert-Beer (MLB) data. We found that the inter-subject variation in SO₂ (standard deviation about 6 %) is considerably larger than the reproducibility (about 1.5 %) both for same day and different day tests. When changes in SO₂ during the cycling test were considered the reproducibility is better than 1 %. Time courses of SRS–based haemoglobin parameters are different from MLB–data with higher reproducibility for SRS. The magnitudes of the haemoglobin changes were found to be considerably larger for the SRS method. Furthermore, the broad band approach was tested against a four-wavelength analysis with the differences found to be negligible.

© 2009 OSA/SPIE