Determination of the scattering coefficient of biological tissue considering the wavelength and absorption dependence of the anisotropy factor

Abstract

The anisotropy factor g, one of the optical properties of biological tissues, has a strong influence on the calculation of the scattering coefficient μ s in inverse Monte Carlo (iMC) simulations. It has been reported that g has the wavelength and absorption dependence; however, few attempts have been made to calculate μ s using g values by taking the wavelength and absorption dependence into account. In this study, the angular distributions of scattered light for biological tissue phantoms containing hemoglobin as a light absorber were measured by a goniometric optical setup at strongly (405 nm) and weakly (664 nm) absorbing wavelengths to obtain g. Subsequently, the optical properties were calculated with the measured values of g by integrating sphere measurements and an iMC simulation, and compared with the results obtained with a conventional g value of 0.9. The μ s values with measured g were overestimated at the strongly absorbing wavelength, but underestimated at the weakly absorbing wavelength if 0.9 was used in the iMC simulation.