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. 2012 Dec 1;3(12):3153-60.
doi: 10.1364/BOE.3.003153. Epub 2012 Nov 7.

A liquid optical phantom with tissue-like heterogeneities for confocal microscopy

Danni Wang  1 , Ye Chen, Jonathan T C Liu
Affiliations

A liquid optical phantom with tissue-like heterogeneities for confocal microscopy

Danni Wang et al. Biomed Opt Express. .

Abstract

Phantoms play an important role in the development, standardization, and calibration of biomedical imaging devices in laboratory and clinical settings, serving as standards to assess the performance of such devices. Here we present the design of a liquid optical phantom to facilitate the assessment of optical-sectioning microscopes that are being developed to enable point-of-care pathology. This phantom, composed of silica microbeads in an Intralipid base, is specifically designed to characterize a reflectance-based dual-axis confocal (DAC) microscope for skin imaging. The phantom mimics the scattering properties of normal human epithelial tissue in terms of an effective scattering coefficient and a depth-dependent degradation in spatial resolution due to beam steering caused by tissue micro-architectural heterogeneities.

Keywords: (170.1790) Confocal microscopy; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging; (170.5810) Scanning microscopy; (170.6900) Three-dimensional microscopy; (170.7050) Turbid media.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
(a) Schematic of experimental setup with the DAC microscope, in which the illumination beam is colored blue and the collection beam path is colored green. (b) The axial response of the DAC microscope when imaging through full-thickness human epithelium (approx. 75- to 125-μm thick) is highly variable and shows a degradation in resolution (−3 dB) compared to a reference water sample. (c) Transverse response of the DAC microscope when imaging through full-thickness human epithelium shows resolution degradation (highly variable) compared to a reference (water) sample. (d) The axial and (e) transverse responses when imaging through ~100 μm of Intralipid do not exhibit a noticeable degradation in resolution.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The axial response of the DAC microscope when investigating different concentrations of MIN-U-SIL®40 bead suspensions.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
(a) The axial and (b) transverse response of the DAC microscope when imaging different formulations of tissue phantoms.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The axial resolution (FWHM) of the DAC microscope as a function of imaging depth through a heterogeneous phantom. Error bars correspond to 1 standard deviation from the mean.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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