A diffusion approximation model of light transport in multilayered skin tissue

In dermatology, biophotonic methods offer high sensitivity and non-invasive measurements of skin tissue optical properties, in various physiological and pathological conditions. There are numerous skin processes, which can be examined and characterized using diagnostic optical spectroscopy, as the monitoring of skin aging, diagnosis of benign and malignant cutaneous lesions, dosimetry in photodynamic therapy (PDT), etc. Several mathematical models have been used to calculate the tissue optical properties from experimental measurements and to predict the light propagation in soft tissues, like skin, based on transport theory or Monte Carlo modeling. This work analyses the phenomena which are observed experimentally during the irradiation of skin, such as the absorption, reflectance, scattering, fluorescence and transmission of laser light. The study was carried out on animal skin samples, extracted post-mortem. In this work we also tried to evaluate the utility of diffusion approximation modeling for measuring the light intensity distribution in the skin samples with cw visible laser beam (lambda,=632.8 nm). The diffusion theory model was tested for the simulation results of the spatial light distribution within a five-layer model of animal skin tissue. We have studied the dependence towards the depth and the radial distance of the photon density of the incident radiation.