Pseudo‐model technique of biological tissues for the development of NIR diffuse optical tomography

Abstract

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a new tomographic technique, which is non‐invasive and does not involve radiation exposure. In this paper, a self‐developed near infrared (NIR) diffuse optical tomography instrument is described, and phantoms composed of Intra‐lipids are discussed. The NIR optical characteristics of the homogenous Intra‐lipid phantoms are measured to construct a set of databases at various concentrations, and further analysis using fitting curves is presented as well. Additionally, a pseudo‐model technique for imitating biological tissues is proposed and implemented. This pseudo‐model can be used to represent the same optical characteristics as real tissues, meaning that it is a viable alternative to cope with measuring limitations. Experiments reveal good results when the pseudo‐model employs 1% Intra‐lipid as a background tissue that imitates pork and 3% Intra‐lipid as an inclusion to mimic a bone. Due to the limitations of hardware nowadays, obviously, this pseudo‐model will offer a great aid for the development and evaluation of a DOT system.