Machine learning estimation of tissue optical properties

Dynamic, in vivo measurement of the optical properties of biological tissues is still an elusive and critically important problem. Here we develop a technique for inverting a Monte Carlo simulation to extract tissue optical properties from the statistical moments of the spatio-temporal response of the tissue by training a 5-layer fully connected neural network. We demonstrate the accuracy of the method across a very wide parameter space on a single homogeneous layer tissue model and demonstrate that the method is insensitive to parameter selection of the neural network model itself. Finally, we propose an experimental setup capable of measuring the required information in real time in an in vivo environment and demonstrate proof-of-concept level experimental results.