Theoretical and experimental comparison of tissue phantoms using white light spectroscopy

Abstract

White light spectroscopy has the potential to be used as an optical biopsy method, as backscattered light data can be related to the cellular nucleus size. In this paper, we compare experimental backscattering results against the general Mie theory simulations. Our experimental technique obtains results in terms of intensity vs. wavelength. We also use optical filters, to limit the source spectrum, and when converting the backscattered data into the Fourier domain, we obtain characteristic frequencies which describe the scatterer size. Phantom tissues, comprised of polystyrene spheres in a liquid or gel, are used for the experiments.