Estimating optical properties in layered tissues by use of the Born approximation of the radiative transport equation.

We use the Born approximation of the radiative transport equation to recover simultaneously the absorption and scattering coefficients in a single layer of a two-layer tissue sample from reflectance data. This method reduces the estimation of both optical properties to a single linear, least-squares problem. It is valid over length scales smaller than a transport mean free path and hence is useful for epithelial tissue layers. We demonstrate the accuracy of this method by using spatially resolved reflectance data computed with Monte Carlo simulations.