Comparison of organic phantom recipes and characterization by time-resolved diffuse optical spectroscopy

Three recipes for tissue constituent-equivalent phantoms of water and lipids are presented. Nature phantoms are made using no emulsifying agent, but just a professional disperser, instead Agar and Triton phantoms are made using agar or Triton X-100, respectively, as agents to emulsify water and lipids. Different water-to-lipid ratios ranging from 30 to 70 percent by mass are proposed and tested. Optical characterization by time-resolved spectroscopy was performed in terms of optical properties, homogeneity, reproducibility and composition retrieval.