REVIEW ARTICLE
Intralipid-Based Phantoms for the Development of New Optical Diagnostic Techniques
Maria Lepore1, Ines Delfino2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 13
First Page: 163
Last Page: 172
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-13-163
DOI: 10.2174/187407070190130163
Article History:
Received Date: 03/09/2019Revision Received Date: 17/10/2019
Acceptance Date: 26/10/2019
Electronic publication date: 11/12/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Intralipid is a material widely employed for the preparation of phantoms for optical imaging and biophotonics applications in medical field. The development of new optical diagnostic equipment in these fields requires the use of well-designed phantoms with optical properties (including scattering and absorption) mimicking those of biological tissues in all the pre-clinical stages of investigations. For this reason, great research effort has been devoted to optically characterize Intralipid and at preparing optimal phantoms. In this short review, we summarize the principal physico-chemical characteristics of Intralipid and the main contributions in the assessment of its scattering and absorption properties. In addition, the most largely used Intralipid-based homogeneous and non-homogeneous phantoms are discussed. Even though other materials are available for the preparation of phantoms, the use of Intralipid still offers an inexpensive and easy-to-use method for preparing phantoms with finely tuned optical properties.