Optical probing of fractal and multifractal connection to structural disorder in weakly optical disordered media: Application to cancer detection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how fractal and multifractal properties of weakly disordered media relate to structural disorder using optical scattering, with applications in cancer detection and insights into tissue heterogeneity.

Contribution

An analytical model linking fractal dimension to structural disorder in weakly scattering media, including multifractal analysis and potential imaging applications.

Findings

Fractal dimension depends on refractive index fluctuations.

Multifractal scattering follows a lognormal distribution.

Model connects optical properties to tissue heterogeneity.

Abstract

The light scattering experiment establishes a relationship between refractive index fluctuations and fractal dimension in weakly scattering tissue-like media. Based on the box-counting approach, an analytical model is developed and shows that the fractal dimension has a functional dependency on the structural disorder or refractive index fluctuation for short-range correlation and approximately linearly depends on each other for tissue-like media. Several parametric imaging systems can be connected using this approach. Further, tissue's weak multifractality optical scattering is explored using the box-counting method. It is shown that with a functional transformation, the distribution follows lognormal distributions.