Learning to simulate realistic human diffuse reflectance spectra

SignificanceHyperspectral imaging is a noninvasive, cost-effective modality with transformative clinical potential. Its adoption is limited by the lack of accurate and efficient methods that relate spectra to tissue parameters, essential for both AI training and validation of imaging methods, as gold standard Monte Carlo (MC) simulations remain prohibitively computationally expensive.AimWe aim to develop a scalable and accurate method for generating realistic tissue reflectance spectra in support of AI development and validation in biomedical imaging.ApproachWe trained a general-purpose neural surrogate model on >50 million MC simulations based on a flexible multilayer tissue model. We validated our model against >5000 open surgery in vivo hyperspectral images, annotated with 23 tissue classes for stratified performance analysis. In addition, we qualitatively evaluated clinical potential by testing whether surrogate-generated spectra enable recovery of organ-specific oxygenation dynamics in a controlled porcine aortic clamping experiment.ResultsThe surrogate model achieved accuracy matching MC simulations with 5–10 million photons while delivering inference five orders of magnitude faster. Across 140 million human tissue spectra, it improved spectral recall by 13–48 percentage points over existing surrogate models. Scaling analyses revealed a power law relationship between training dataset size and test error, enabling the prediction of training data requirements for target accuracy. Our porcine study suggests that the synthetic data generated with the surrogate model is suitable for recovering organ-specific stO2 trajectories.ConclusionNeural surrogate models can achieve MC-level accuracy and in vivo realism at negligible inference cost, enabling large-scale, compute-efficient data generation for biomedical optics and robust AI development for clinical applications.