Epoxy resin phantoms emulating oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin for applications in optical mammography

In this work, we developed phantoms that can properly emulate either benign or malignant tumors for testing the performance of continuous wave (CW) NIRS devices for Optical Mammopgraphy. The main advantage of these phantoms is that oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin are mimicked by artificial commercially available absorbents, namely a dye (ADS830WS) and an ink (Epson673), thus requiring neither special preparation protocols nor careful storage, which makes them very stable in time. Tumor-like inclusions were made of epoxy resin containing these two absorbents to emulate the absorption of the hemoglobins in a fibradenoma and an adenocarcinoma. To evaluate the approach we performed CW transmittance imaging experiments, which were validated by Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Results indicate that the constructed tumor phantoms effectively replicate the desired targets. Moreover, the reconstruction algorithm was able to discriminate between the two types of lesions mimicked in this study.