Determinants of skeletal muscle oxygen consumption assessed by near-infrared diffuse correlation spectroscopy during incremental handgrip exercise.

Near-infrared diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is a rapidly evolving optical imaging technique for the assessment of skeletal muscle O utilization (mVO). We compared DCS-derived determinants of mVO with conventional measures [blood flow by brachial artery Doppler ultrasound and venous O saturation ()] in eight volunteers at rest and during incremental handgrip exercise. Brachial artery blood flow and DCS-derived blood flow index (BFI) were linearly related (R = 0.57) and increased with each workload, whereas decreased from 65.3 ± 2.5% (rest) to 39.9 ± 3.0% (light exercise; < 0.01) with no change thereafter. In contrast, DCS-derived tissue O saturation decreased progressively with each incremental stage ( < 0.01), driven almost entirely by an initial steep rise in deoxyhemoglobin/myoglobin, followed by a linear increase thereafter. Whereas seemingly disparate at first glance, we believe these two approaches provide similar information. Indeed, by plotting the mean convective O delivery and diffusive O conductance, we show that the initial increase in mVO during the transition from rest to exercise was achieved by a greater increase in diffusive O conductance versus convective O delivery (10-fold vs. 4-fold increase, respectively), explaining the initial decline in . In contrast, the increase in mVO from light to heavy exercise was achieved by equal increases (1.8-fold) in convective O delivery and diffusive O conductance, explaining the plateau in . That DCS-derived BFI and deoxyhemoglobin/myoglobin (surrogate measure of O extraction) share the same general biphasic pattern suggests that both DCS and conventional approaches provide complementary information regarding the determinants of mVO. Near-infrared diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is an emerging optical imaging technique for quantifying skeletal muscle O delivery and utilization at the microvascular level. Here, we show that DCS provides complementary insight into the determinants of muscle O consumption across a wide range of exercise intensities, further establishing the utility of DCS.