Abstract

Fat emulsions like Intralipid are frequently used in research of light propagation in turbid media as tissue phantoms. We investigated the optical properties, the scattering coefficient μ_s, the reduced scattering coefficient ${\mu }_s^{{}^{\prime }}$ and the anisotropy factor g of different major brands and different fat concentrations (10% and 20%) of these fat emulsions in the visible from 450 nm to 950 nm. The phase function was measured with a goniometrical setup and the anisotropy factor was calculated from this. A collimated transmission setup was used to measure μ_s. Significant differences were found between the different brands and between different concentrations of the same brand. We also found significant differences compared to the values published in literature.

© 2007 SPIE