Construction, calibration and evaluation of a tissue phantom with reproducible optical properties for investigations in light emission tomography

We describe in details the materials and methods used to construct, calibrate and evaluate tissue phantoms and light sources; we describe the method for acquiring the data and present quantitative results for light intensity reconstruction using the reproducible phantom's optical properties as a priori information. We consider a tissue phantom imaging with optical properties which match those for typical mouse tissues, as a useful part of light diffusion studies in heterogeneous biological media in order to obtain important parameters for any reconstruction technique. Solid tissue phantoms are particularly useful for the study of light-tissue interaction and are still an active area of investigation.