A comparison between plausible models in layered turbid media with geometrical variations applying a Bayesian selection criterion

VERA, DEMIÁN AUGUSTO; BAEZ, GUIDO R; GARCÍA, HÉCTOR A; IRIARTE DANIELA I; POMARICO, JUAN A

Biomedical Physics and Engineering Express

IOP Publishing Ltd

Año: 2020 vol. 6

One possible application of Near Infrared techniques is to analyze human brain metabolic activity.Currently used models take into account the layered structure of the human head but, usually, they donot consider the non-planar surface of some of the boundaries, i.e. gray matter, which results in amuch more complex structure, thus leading to more sophisticated models and longer calculationtimes. The main objective of this work is to determine if it is worth to replace a planar layered structureby a non-planar one. To this end we implement a Bayesian-based quantitative methodology forchoosing between two competitive models describing light propagation in layered turbid media.Experiments of time-resolved diffuse reflectance measurements are performed in layered phantomsand complemented with numerical calculations. The resulting Distributions of Time of Flight ofboth models are compared using Bayesian model selection analysis. The non-planar interface wasintroduced in the simulations by a simple surface parametrization. Results suggest that, under certainconditions, a multilayer model with planar boundaries is good enough.