Applicability of diffusion approximation in analysis of diffuse reflectance spectra from healthy human skin

摘要

Measurement of diffuse reflectance spectra (DRS) is a common experimental approach for non-invasive determination of tissue optical properties, as well as objective monitoring of various tissue malformations. Propagation of light in scattering media is often treated in diffusion approximation (DA). The major advantage of this approach is that it leads to enclosed analytical solutions for tissues with layered structure, which includes human skin. Despite the fact that DA solutions were shown to be inaccurate near tissue boundaries, the practicality of this approach makes it quite popular, especially when attempting extraction of specific chromophore concentrations from measured DRS. In this study we analyze the discrepancies between DRS spectra as obtained by using the DA solutions for three-layer skin model and more accurate predictions from Monte Carlo (MC) modeling. Next, we analyze the artifacts which result from the above discrepancies when extracting the parameters of skin structure and composition by fitting the DA solutions to the MC spectra. The reliability and usefulness of such a fit is then tested also on measurements of seasonal changes in otherwise healthy human skin.