Optical taxonomic signal

Scattering of light by biological tissue has hindered applications of spectroscopy to medical diagnosis. We describe here a combination of feature selection techniques and several discriminant statistics that may mitigate this problem. In the particular case of spectroscopy, a useful feature should have linewidth, which in practice means that the discriminant statistic should have significant values on several contiguous pixels of the detector. We also suggest a definition for optical taxonomic signal as a measure of how efficacious a particular combination may be and how much other variables such as source-detector separation and fiber width may affect discrimination.