Local and superficial optical characterization of biological tissues can be achieved by measuring the spatially resolved diffuse reflectance at small source-detector separations. The sensitivity of the signal to the phase function, absorption and scattering coefficients were studied using Monte Carlo simulations. Measurements of spatially resolved reflectance were performed in vivo on human brain with source-detector separations from 0.3 to 1.5 mm. Distinct optical properties were found between normal cortex, astrocytoma of optic nerve and normal optic nerve.

Local and superficial optical property characterization of biological tissues can be performed by measuring spatially-resolved diffuse reflectance at small source-detector separations. Monte Carlo simulations and experiments were performed to assess the performance of a spatially-resolved reflectance probe, employing multiple detector fibers (0.3 to 1.4 mm from the source). Under these conditions, the inverse problem, i.e. calculating the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients, is necessarily sensitive to the phase function. This effect must be taken into account by considering a new parameter of the phase function, which depends on the first and second moments of the phase function. Probe performance is compared to another technique for quantitatively measuring optical coefficients, based on the analysis of photon density waves (Frequency Domain Photon Migration). The two techniques are found to be in reasonable agreement. However, the spatially resolved probe shows optimum measurement sensitivity in the volume immediately beneath the probe, while FDPM typically samples much larger regions of tissues. Measurements on human brain in vivo are reported using both methods.