Noninvasive Detection of the Skin Structure and Inversed Retrieval of Chromophore Information Based on Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy

Abstract

The detection of skin's structure lays the foundation for personalized laser surgery of vascular skin disease, which can be noninvasively achieved by diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). A two-step inverse Monte Carlo radiation method based on DRS under two source-detector separations was proposed to quantify the skin structure, including chromophore concentration (melanin f_m and hemoglobin f_b), epidermal thickness t_epi, average vessel diameter D_ves, depth d_pws and thickness t_pws of the vascular layer for diseased skin. The method fitted the simulated DRS to the measured DRS iteratively, differences between which were described by a specific objective function to amplify blood absorption at 500-600 nm, and D_ves, d_pws, and t_pws were estimated based on f_m, f_b, and t_pws fitted in the first step. The results showed that the two-step method dramatically improve the inversion accuracy with mean errors of f_m, f_b, t_pws, and d_pws less than 5%.

Keywords: diffuse reflectance spectroscopy; inverse Monte Carlo method; nonlinear optimization; skin structure.