Tissue-like phantoms for quantitative birefringence imaging

Birefringence imaging, including polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT), can provide valuable insight into the microscopic structure and organization of many biological tissues. In this paper, we report on a method to fabricate tissue-like birefringence phantoms for such imagin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Xinyu, Beaudette, Kathy, Wang, Xianghong, Liu, Linbo, Bouma, Brett E., Villiger, Martin
Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87063
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44252
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Birefringence imaging, including polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT), can provide valuable insight into the microscopic structure and organization of many biological tissues. In this paper, we report on a method to fabricate tissue-like birefringence phantoms for such imaging modalities. We utilize the photo-elastic effect, wherein birefringence is induced by stretching a polymer sample after heating it above its glass-transition temperature. The cooled samples stably exhibit homogeneous birefringence, and were assembled into phantoms containing multiple well-defined regions of distinct birefringence. We present planar slab phantoms for microscopy applications and cylindrical phantoms for catheter-based imaging and demonstrate quantitative analysis of the birefringence within individual regions of interest. Birefringence phantoms enable testing, validating, calibrating, and improving PS-OCT acquisition systems and reconstruction strategies.