The absorption, scattering, and anisotropy coefficients of the fat emulsion Intralipid-10% have been measured at 457.9, 514.5, 632.8, and 1064 nm. The size and shape distributions of the scattering particles in Intralipid-10% were determined by transmission electron microscopy. Mie theory calculations performed by using the particle size distribution yielded values for the scattering and anisotropy coefficients from 400 to 1100 nm. The agreement with experimental values is better than 6%.

A method is described for finding the optical properties (scattering, absorption, and scattering anisotropy) of a slab of turbid material by using total reflection, unscattered transmission, and total transmission measurements. This method is applicable to homogeneous turbid slabs with any optical thickness,albedo, or phase function. The slab may have a different index of refraction from its surroundings and may or may not be bounded by glass. The optical properties are obtained by iterating an adding-doubling solution of the radiative transport equation until the calculated values of the reflection and transmission match the measured ones. Exhaustive numerical tests show that the intrinsic error in the method is < 3% when four quadrature points are used.

No abstract

Intralipidm is an intravenous nutrient consisting of an emulsion of phospholipid micelles and water. Because Intralipid is turbid and has no strong absorption bands in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and is readily available and relatively inexpensive, it is often used as a tissue simulating phantom medium in light dosimetry experiments. In order to assist investigators requiring a controllable medium that over a finite range of wavelengths is optically equivalent to tissue, we have compiled previously published values of the optical interaction coefficients of Intralipid, most of which were measured at a wavelength of 633 nm. We have extended the measurements of the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients from 460 to 690 nm and the total attenuation coefficient from 500 to 890 nm. These measurements show that, for stock 10% Intralipid, the absorption coefficient varies from 0.015 to 0.001 cm-' between 460 and 690 nm, the reduced scattering coefficient varies from 92 to 50 cm-' between 460 and 690 nm, the total attenuation coefficient varies from 575 to 150 cm-l between 500 and 890 nm, and the average cosine of scatter varies from 0.87 to 0.82 between 460 and 690 nm. With these data, we discuss the design of an optically tissue-equivalent phantom consisting of Intralipid and black India ink. 0 1992 Wiley-Liss, Inc.