An important parameter in medical diagnostic and one of the most frequently determined analyte in the hospitals is blood
glucose. Fast and accurate methods of measuring blood glucose concentrations could therefore be significant. We will in
this paper investigate the feasibility of using a spatially resolved steady-state diffuse reflectance spectroscopy in the
wavelength region 1000-1700nm, where glucose has two absorption peaks at around 1250nm and 1600nm, to quickly
determine the concentration of glucose in tissue-like material. This method could later be transferred to estimate the
amount of glucose in blood both in vivo e.g. the forearm and in vitro e.g. on blood samples.
The novel spatially resolved system that is used for this study is based around a 2D InGaAs detector and a fibre probe
with 10 fibres, one as a source and 9 to collect the diffuse reflected light at distances between 0.3-2.7mm from the
source. An inversion method using Monte Carlo generated diffuse reflectance profiles is used to estimate the absolute
absorption coefficient (μa) and reduced scattering coefficient (μs') which could be used to estimate the glucose
concentration in the tissue-like phantoms. The method was investigated by performing spatially resolved measurements
on turbid gelatin phantoms containing mixtures of water and D2O as absorbers, Intralipid as a scatterer and glucose. The
phantoms were made with four different glucose concentrations spanning the range of 0-5000 mg/dl.
For non-invasive estimation of optical properties (i.e. determination of the absorption and the reduced scattering
coefficients) of turbid media such as tissue, spatially resolved diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is one of most used
technique. So far this has only been done for wavelengths covered by CCD-detectors (about 350-1050nm). The NIR
region beyond 1050nm i.e. the second and first overtone regions, has absorption peaks of interest e.g. for tissue the
glucose peak at around 1250nm and 1600nm. Thus for non-invasive medical diagnostics applications, a spatially
resolved measurement system capable of estimating optical properties in this region will be very useful. Until now
optical properties of tissue in this region have only been estimated using in vitro methods e.g. using an integrating sphere
set-up.
In this paper we describe a spatially resolved system that will extend the region up to 1700nm by using a TE cooled
320×256 pixel InGaAS detector, a white light source and a probe that consists of 9×200micron fibres spanning 0.3 to
2.7mm from the source. Across the 320 pixels 680nm will be dispersed giving a resolution of 2.125nm/pixel and a
resolving power of about 14nm. The system is validated using tissue-like phantoms. Since tissue has a high concentration
of water which leads to high absorption after 950nm, the diffusion approximation cannot be used to extract the optical
properties from the spatially resolved measurements. Instead, two techniques based around Monte Carlo simulations of
diffuse reflectance profiles, to build a lookup table coupled with interpolation using splines or a third order polynomial,
have been used to calculate the optical properties for different wavelengths. The performances of these techniques are
compared. It was found that the spline fitting produced lower error for the wavelength region considered.
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