Determination of Tissue Optical Parameters with a New Inverse Monte Carlo Method

This paper presents a new method for determining optical parameters of biological tissues (absorption coefficient and transport scattering coefficient), based on non-invasive measurements of diffuse light reflection. The method uses a kinetic model of light propagation in a medium and new weight Monte Carlo algorithms for the simultaneous calculation of several detectors' readings and their derivatives with respect to parameters for given sets of optical parameters. The method is implemented as a hardware and software system and tested on tissue-equivalent phantoms and natural biological tissues.