Understanding the behaviour of light propagation in biological materials is essential for biomedical engineering and its applications. Among the key optical properties of biological media is the angular distribution of the scattered light, characterized by the average cosine of the scattering angle, called the scattering anisotropy coefficient (g). The value of g can be determined by experimentally irradiating the material with a laser beam and making angular-scattering measurements in a goniometer. In this work, an experimental technique was used to determine g by means of goniometric measurements of the laser light scattered off two different dental-resin composites (classified as nano and hybrid). To assess the accuracy of the experimental method, a Mie theory-based computational model was used. Independent measurements were used to determine some of the required input parameters for computation of the theoretical model. The g values estimated with the computational method (nano-filled: 0.9399; hybrid: 0.8975) and the values calculated with the experimental method presented (nano-filled: 0.98297 +/- 0.00021; hybrid: 0.95429 +/- 0.00014) agreed well for both dental resins, with slightly higher experimental values. The higher experimental values may indicate that the scattering particle causes more narrow-angle scattering than does a perfect sphere of equal volume, assuming that with more spherical scattering particles the scattering anisotropy coefficient increases. Since g represents the angular distribution of the scattered light, values provided by both the experimental and the computational methods show a strongly forward-directed scattering in the dental resins studied, more pronounced in the nano-filled composite than in the hybrid composite.
