Poly(vinyl alcohol) gels as photoacoustic breast phantoms revisited

Xia, Wenfeng and Piras, Daniele and Heijblom, Michelle and Steenbergen, Wiendelt and Leeuwen van, Ton and Manohar, Srirang (2011) Poly(vinyl alcohol) gels as photoacoustic breast phantoms revisited. Journal of Biomedical Optics, 16 (7). 075002. ISSN 1083-3668

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Abstract:	A popular phantom in photoacoustic imaging is poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) hydrogel fabricated by freezing and thawing (F–T) aqueous solutions of PVA. The material possesses acoustic and optical properties similar to those of tissue. Earlier work characterized PVA gels in small test specimens where temperature distributions during F–T are relatively homogeneous. In this work, in breast-sized samples we observed substantial temperature differences between the shallow regions and the interior during the F–T procedure. We investigated whether spatial variations were also present in the acoustic and optical properties. The speed of sound, acoustic attenuation, and optical reduced scattering coefficients were measured on specimens sampled at various locations in a large phantom. In general, the properties matched values quoted for breast tissue. But while acoustic properties were relatively homogeneous, the reduced scattering was substantially different at the surface compared with the interior. We correlated these variations with gel microstructure inspected using scanning electron microscopy. Interestingly, the phantom's reduced scattering spatial distribution matches the optical properties of the standard two-layer breast model used in x ray dosimetry. We conclude that large PVA samples prepared using the standard recipe make excellent breast tissue phantoms
Item Type:	Article
Copyright:	© 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Faculty:	Science and Technology (TNW)
Research Group:	Biomedical Photonic Imaging (BMPI)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/77678
Official URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.3597616
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