Specificity of noninvasive blood glucose monitoring with optical coherence tomography

Management of diabetic disease requires frequent monitoring of blood glucose concentration. Development of a noninvasive technique capable of reliable and sensitive monitoring of blood glucose concentration would considerably improve quality of life of diabetic patients and reduce mortality associated with this disease. Recently, we proposed to use Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) technique for noninvasive glucose monitoring. In this paper, we tested in animals several aspects of specificity of noninvasive blood glucose monitoring with the OCT technique. Influence of temperature and tissue heterogeneity on the OCT signal profile is experimentally studied in this paper. We also theoretically investigated the changes in tissue scattering induced by variation of concentration of glucose and other osmolytes. Obtained results suggest that although several physical and chemical agents could potentially interfere with blood glucose concentration measurements using the OCT technique, their effect is smaller compared to that of glucose under normal physiological conditions.