Determination of tissue optical properties from spatially resolved relative diffuse reflectance by PCA-NN

Noninvasive determination of tissue optical properties is essential for clinical applications in medical diagnostics and therapeutics. In this paper, we describe a method to determine reduced scattering coefficient /spl mu/s´ and absorption coefficient /spl mu/a from spatially resolved relative diffuse reflectance. A neural network in conjunction with data preprocessing technique - principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to perform the estimations from the diffuse reflectance data generated by Monte Carlo simulations. The PCA-NN was trained and tested on the space with /spl mu/s´ between 0.1 and 2.0 mm/sup -1/ and /spl mu/a between 0.01 and 0.1 mm/sup -1/. Tests on the above space show the rms errors of this method to be 4.6% for /spl mu/s´ and 9.2% for /spl mu/a. It´s a more efficient and robust way for real-time clinical applications than other methods.