Recovery of layered tissue optical properties from spatial frequency-domain spectroscopy and a deterministic radiative transport solver.

We present a method to recover absorption and reduced scattering spectra for each layer of a two-layer turbid media from spatial frequency-domain spectroscopy data. We focus on systems in which the thickness of the top layer is less than the transport mean free path   (  0.1  -  0.8l  *    )  . We utilize an analytic forward solver, based upon the N'th-order spherical harmonic expansion with Fourier decomposition   (  SHEFN  )   method in conjunction with a multistage inverse solver. We test our method with data obtained using spatial frequency-domain spectroscopy with 32 evenly spaced wavelengths within λ  =  450 to 1000 nm on six-layered tissue phantoms with distinct optical properties. We demonstrate that this approach can recover absorption and reduced scattering coefficient spectra for both layers with accuracy comparable with current Monte Carlo methods but with lower computational cost and potential flexibility to easily handle variations in parameters such as the scattering phase function or material refractive index. To our knowledge, this approach utilizes the most accurate deterministic forward solver used in such problems and can successfully recover properties from a two-layer media with superficial layer thicknesses.