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Optical measurement methods are indispensable tool in biomedical research, providing invaluable information on optical properties of biological tissues. However, the application of these techniques is a big challenge, as most tissues are highly scattering materials whose optical properties cannot be measured in a straightforward way, due to multiple scattering of photons. Therefore, new optical measurement techniques and methods for highly scattering media are being developed to address this problem. One of the very promising techniques is time-of-flight spectroscopy. The paper presents problems encountered in reconstruction of basic optical parameters of tissues or other highly scattering materials from optical time-of-flight spectroscopy measurement data. To estimate the reconstruction accuracy of optical parameters (i.e. absorption coefficient, scattering coefficient, anisotropy factor and refractive index) the test data were generated by a computer program simulating light propagation in highly scattering material by Monte Carlo method. Following, a set of computer programs based on diffusion equation and optimization algorithms such as simplex method and genetic method were used to reconstruct optical parameters from the test data. Finally, by comparing reconstructed optical parameters with those used for generation of the test data, the accuracy of reconstructing algorithms it was estimated.
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