Estimation of nanoparticle concentration in tissue phantoms using diffused reflectance spectroscopy.

• Main Author: Lee, Chee Kiat.
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Chemistry::Biochemistry::Spectroscopy
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50176
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nanoparticle has been known to revolutionise our world and it is widely used in many biomedical applications such as Plasmonic Photothermal Therapy and many bio-imaging modalities. Along with the popularisation of nanoparticle in biomedical applications, it brought along issues of nanotoxicity and effectiveness which leads to the question of optimizing nanoparticle concentration. Currently, the only well established way of obtaining nanoparticle concentration is via Neutron Activation Analysis; a method which is very troublesome and destructive. On a similar note, some had tried to use other less invasive method such as Diffused Reflectance Spectroscopy, and used inverse algorithm based on diffusion theory to derive nanoparticle concentration. In this project, we have adopted the well established Taylor expansion model to model the diffused reflectance spectrum. In our preliminary study, we determined the applicability of modelling diffused reflectance spectrum with Taylor expansion model. And in the subsequent study, estimate nanoparticle concentration with Taylor expansion model. All studies were done in liquid phantoms having varying concentrations of gold nanorod. The effect of inherent absorption and scattering of phantoms in retrieving gold nanorod concentration was also studied. In addition, we have investigated the effect of source-detector separation in estimating nanoparticle concentration using Diffused Reflectance Spectroscopy.