Validation of diffuse correlation spectroscopy sensitivity to nicotinamide-induced blood flow elevation in the murine hindlimb using the fluorescent microsphere technique

Nicotinamide has been shown to affect blood flow in both tumor and normal tissues, including skeletal muscle. Intraperitoneal injection of nicotinamide was used as a simple intervention to test the sensitivity of noninvasive diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) to changes in blood flow in the murine left quadriceps femoris skeletal muscle. DCS was then compared with the gold-standard fluorescent microsphere (FM) technique for validation. The nicotinamide dose-response experiment showed that relative blood flow measured by DCS increased following treatment with 500- and 1000-mg  /  kg nicotinamide. The DCS and FM technique comparison showed that blood flow index measured by DCS was correlated with FM counts quantified by image analysis. The results of this study show that DCS is sensitive to nicotinamide-induced blood flow elevation in the murine left quadriceps femoris. Additionally, the results of the comparison were consistent with similar studies in higher-order animal models, suggesting that mouse models can be effectively employed to investigate the utility of DCS for various blood flow measurement applications.