Impact of contact pressure-induced spectral changes on soft-tissue classification in diffuse reflectance spectroscopy: problems and solutions

Review of the existing studies on the contact pressure-induced changes in the optical properties of biological tissues showed that the reported changes in transmittance, reflectance, absorption, and scattering coefficient are vastly inconsistent. In order to gain more insight into the contact pressure-induced changes observed in biomedical applications involving common probe-spectrometer diffuse reflectance measurement setups and provide a set of practical guidelines minimizing the influence of the changes on the analysis of acquired spectra, we conducted a series of in vivo measurements, where the contact pressure was precisely controlled, and the spectral and contact pressure information were acquired simultaneously. Classification of three measurement sites on a human hand, representing the natural variability in the perfusion and structure of the underlying tissue, was assessed by training and evaluating classifiers at different contact pressure levels and for different probe operators. Based on the results, three practical guidelines have been proposed to avoid classification performance degradation. First, the most suitable pressure level should be identified. Second, the pressure level should be kept in a narrow range during the acquisition of spectra. Third, applications utilizing probes equipped with a calibrated spring can use several classifiers trained at different contact pressure levels to improve classification performance. (C) The Authors.