Optical characterization of turbid media in a cuvette geometry with a calibrated lookup table

Measuring the optical properties of small-volume turbid samples remains a significant challenge. This work presents the experimental optimization and validation of a frequency-domain diffuse optical method applied to media in a standard cuvette geometry. We assessed the impact of boundary conditions, determining that reflective cuvette walls provide superior precision and reproducibility compared to absorbing walls. Additionally, we developed a physics-informed lookup table based on diffusion theory and calibrated it using experimental data from optically characterized samples. Results demonstrate a precision of about 0.3% for the measured optical data and accuracies of approximately 20% for absorption and 10% for scattering using only four calibration samples, confirming the method’s feasibility for milliliter-scale optical characterization. To our knowledge, this represents the first experimental validation of a cuvette-based system for the quantitative optical characterization of turbid media.