Simulation of spectral reflectance of multiple scattering medium using the Mie theory combined with the Monte Carlo method

We present the method which can calculate the spectral reflectance from physical parameters corresponding to the pathological features, e.g. average size of cell nuclei and standard deviation of cell nuclear size distribution, in consideration of multiple scattering in biological tissue. In this paper, the method combined the Monte Carlo method which simulates multiple scattering effects and the Mie theory which provides phase function (angular properties of light scattering) and scattering coefficient was employed. In order to investigate the validity of this method, the calculated spectra by the method and Monte Carlo method with Henyey-Greenstein phase functions were compared with measurement spectra derived from the tissue phantom whose size distribution has double peaks. From the results, it is shown that the method can better predict the spectral reflectance of tissue phantom rather than Monte Carlo method with Henyey-Greenstein phase function.