Rapid inverse radiative transfer solver for multiparameter spectrophotometry without integrating sphere

Multiparameter spectrophotometry (MPS) provides a powerful tool for accurate characterization of turbid materials in applications such as analysis of material compositions, assay of biological tissues for clinical diagnosis and food safety monitoring. This work is aimed at development and validation of a rapid inverse solver based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to retrieve the radiative transfer (RT) parameters of absorption coefficient, scattering coefficient and anisotropy factor of a turbid sample. Monte Carlo (MC) simulations were performed to obtain calculated signals for comparison to the measured ones of diffuse reflectance, diffuse transmittance and forward transmittance. An objective function has been derived and combined with the PSO algorithm to iterate MC simulations for MPS. We have shown that the objective function can significantly reduce the variance in calculated signals by local averaging of an inverse squared error sum function between measured and calculated signals in RT parameter space. For validation of the new objective function for PSO based inverse solver, the RT parameters of 20% Intralipid solutions have been determined from 520 to 1000 nm which took about 2.7 minutes on average to complete signal measurement and inverse calculation per wavelength. The rapid solver enables MPS to be translated into easy-to-use and cost-effective instruments without integrating sphere for material characterization by separating and revealing compositional profiles at the molecular and particulate scales.