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

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.