Author Spotlight: A Stable Phantom Material for Optical and Acoustic Imaging

Our research is focused on developing new imaging modalities for early cancer detection. In this study in particular, we focused on developing a stable test object, or also called phantom, to validate imaging modalities based on light and/or sound. Different resources have been proposed to develop tissue mimicking materials in the acoustic optical regimen.

For example, PVA, hydrogels, polyurethane, or PVCP. This study focuses on a promising new material type based on core polyman oil composition, which overcomes many of the tunability and stability challenges. The field of biomedical optics covers a wide range of imaging modalities that can be applied to some of the key challenges facing medicine today.

Many of the all optical imaging modalities are relatively depth limited, but we can also couple light with sound through the photoacoustic effect to take advantage of some of the depth penetration benefits of ultrasound. Photoacoustic imaging has shown promise in a wide range of clinical trials, from imaging inflammation to cancer diagnosis. However, quantitative performance assessment remains challenging due to a lack of available phantom materials that can accurately mimic the optical and acoustic properties of tissue and remain stable over time.

Many new optical and photoacoustic imaging systems are being developed, but we lack a standardized reference phantom to validate those systems and to compare their performance. Our material is a promising candidate to fill this gap and support further development and translation of these exciting new techniques into the clinic. In the future, we would like to focus on creating more anatomically realistic phantom designs and architectures that are suitable to evaluate the performance of different system configurations.

For example, microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic systems, which have different geometries and spatial resolutions.