LAUSR

Abstract Diffuse reflectance from biological tissue has been widely used in diagnostic oncology for characterizing biochemical and morphological changes in epithelial tissue. However, computational complexity and time consumption involved in the extraction of absorption and scattering properties of tissues from diffuse reflectance reduce its potentiality for the effective diagnosis in a clinical setup. In this regard, a simple and accurate empirical equation for diffuse reflectance from a turbid medium was developed. A diffuse reflectance lookup table was generated using Monte Carlo simulations of all the optical properties typical of soft tissues in the visible and near infrared region of the spectrum for a semi-infinite medium. The generated lookup table was used to extract an empirical equation for diffuse reflectance using the surface fitting method. The proposed equation was tested with simulations and tissue phantom validation studies. The accuracy of the proposed empirical equation is tenfold higher than the diffusion approximation method. The uniqueness of the present method lies in its reliability even at extremities.