Tissue-mimicking phantoms for biomedical applications

Emerging biomedical instrumentation for imaging and diagnostics requires tissue-mimicking phantoms with optical properties close to those of real biological tissues. Many such tissues and organs consist of several layers with different physical properties, e.g. the head includes the brain, skull, and skin, which in turn also comprise several layers. Structure, optical and mechanical properties depend on the purpose of phantoms and studied materials and technologies. In this paper, we present both plain single-, multi-layered phantoms, and complex opto-mechanical phantoms that imitate parts of the body, in particular, the head. We describe the procedure, materials, internal structure, and tuning of the optical properties of two different phantom manufacturing methods as well as show examples of tissue-mimicking phantoms for different biomedical applications.