Determination of the optical properties of rat tissue

Abstract

Non-invasive methods offer a great advantage over more conventional medical methods but many studies need to be done before such methods become easily accessible and usable. Many of these non-invasive methods are dependant on the interaction of light with tissue. Such interaction is influenced by the optical properties such as the absorption (ua) and reduced scattering (us') coefficients of the tissue. When consulting the literature however one finds there exists a huge discrepancy between measurements and an extensive database of optical properties is not available. Furthermore measurement of the in vivo tissue optical properties still poses some difficulty, however the Integrating Sphere (IS) system is one method which can be used to measure the optical properties of bulk tissue in vitro. This study thus involved investigating the optical properties of some tissue samples from rats. Some of the results are presented here.