Wide-field optical properties estimation of whole limbs in muscle dystrophy murine models via SFDI: a case study

Abstract

This manuscript analyzes the optical properties of dystrophic mice legs, which have been obtained by Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI). We used a custom-built SFDI system with spectrometric capabilities so that wavelength-resolved absorption (μa) and scattering (μ′s) coefficients can be calculated. Samples were measured sequentially at ten different frequencies to find their frequency-dependent diffuse reflectance. Additionally, the Monte Carlo method has been applied to generate a Look-Up Table (LUT) to speed up the estimation of the optical parameters, with the GPU-accelerated version of Monte Carlo for Multi-Layered tissues (MCML), CUDAMCML. We found that the diffuse reflectance (Rd) has a different behavior in terms of the wavelength (λ), which gave rise to different values of µa and μ′s in terms of λ. Given that the μa is related to the chemical composition, the differences in wavelength could be used to quantify the presence of chemical components in the samples and, the μ′s, which relates to the internal structure, can be utilized to identify dystrophy centers inside the mice leg.