Fabrication and characterization of multi-biomarker optimized tissue-mimicking phantoms for multi-modal optical spectroscopy.

Rapid advancement of novel optical spectroscopy and imaging systems relies on the availability of well-characterised and reproducible protocols for phantoms as a standard for the validation of the technique. The tissue-mimicking phantoms are also used to investigate photon transport in biological samples before clinical trials that require well-characterized phantoms with known optical properties (reduced scattering (') and absorption () coefficients). However, at present, there is limited literature available providing well-characterized phantom recipes considering various biomarkers and tested over a wide range of optical properties covering most of the human organs and applicable to multimodal optical spectroscopy.