Background/purpose: The penetration depth of light in diffuse reflectance near-infrared spectroscopy for measuring water content in skin is assessed both from theoretical and experimental points of view.
Methods: The Monte Carlo simulation was implemented to investigate the dependencies of the light penetration depth on a sourcedetector distance. To compare with the simulation results, an in vivo experiment for water contents of skin was performed introducing two different optical fiber probes.
Results: It is found that the minimum separation between a source and detector fibers influences largely the measurement depth. The larger separation leads to a deeper measurement depth at a particular wavelength. The measurement depth is also influenced fairly by the absorption coefficient of the tissue. The larger absorption coefficient results in a shallower measurement depth.
Conclusion: The correlations between the water contents measured by the optical and capacitance techniques were discussed. The dependencies of the light penetration depth on the source-detector geometry and wavelength are presented.
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Accepted for publication 15 July 2004
Affiliations
1National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Ibaraki, Japan, 2Life Science Research Center, SHISEIDO, Yokohama, Japan and 3University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan
Correspondence
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