Determining optical properties of skin ex-vivo: An inverse solution

TL;DR

This paper presents a rapid numerical method using inverse adding doubling to accurately determine the optical properties of ex-vivo skin tissue, validated on pigskin as a human surrogate, with potential for diverse probe geometries.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptable inverse solution approach for optical property measurement of biological tissues using diffuse reflectance data.

Findings

Validated method on pigskin as a human tissue surrogate

Accurate optical property measurements across various probe geometries

Potential for application in biomedical tissue analysis

Abstract

A rapid and accurate numerical solution to the transport equation (i.e., inverse adding doubling) of diffuse reflectance has been utilized here for the calculation of optical properties of the Yucatan miniature pigskin as human surrogate skin. This method is valid for a wide range of optical properties and can be adapted to a variety of probe geometries, provided calibration measurements are made. Inverse adding doubling (IAD), based on the forward solution to the transport equation is a numerical solution in which optical properties can be used as a prior for computing other properties for turbid media. In this work, integrating spheres with fitted laser diodes and a monochromator was used experimentally as the irradiation source. A cryo-microtome was used to precisely slice tissue samples. Confocal and atomic force microscopy optical methods were used to visualize tissue post-irradiation. The results from this work offer an additional method to determine the optical properties of biological tissues.