Empirical relationship between Kubelka–Munk and radiative transfer coefficients for extracting optical parameters of tissues in diffusive and nondiffusive regimes

Abstract. Kubelka–Munk (K-M) theory is a phenomenological light transport theory that provides analytical expressions for reflectance and transmittance of diffusive substrates such as tissues. Many authors have derived relations between coefficients of K-M theory and that of the more fundamental radiative transfer equations. These relations are valid only in diffusive light transport regime where scattering dominates over absorption. They also fail near boundaries where incident beams are not diffusive. By measuring total transmittance and total reflectance of tissue phantoms with varying optical parameters, we have obtained empirical relations between K-M coefficients and the radiative transport coefficients for integrating sphere-based spectrophotometers that use uniform, nondiffusive incident beams. Our empirical relations show that the K-M scattering coefficients depend only on reduced scattering coefficient (μs′), whereas the K-M absorption coefficient depends on both absorption (μa) and reduced scattering (μs′) coefficients of radiative transfer theory. We have shown that these empirical relations are valid in both the diffusive and nondiffusive regimes and can predict total reflectance within an error of 10%. They also can be used to solve the inverse problem of obtaining multiple optical parameters such as chromophore concentration and tissue thickness from the measured reflectance spectra with a maximum accuracy of 90% to 95%.