Development of a fat phantom

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Project Description

Phantoms that closely mimic the dielectric properties of human tissues play an important role in testing and evaluating devices and various treatment and diagnostic schemes. A phantom is a physical model made from tissue equivalent materials to imitate the characteristics of biological tissue and of wave propagation inside the human body. The phantoms can be generalized into two groups: to mimic high-water-content tissues (muscle, brain) and low-water-content tissues (fat, bone). Finding a good composition of the latter is still challenging.

In this project we investigate phantoms comprising discontinuous or percolating oil phase in hydrogel continuous matrix manufactured from oil-in-water emulsion precursors. Focusing on the influence of the composition on their dielectric properties at the microwave frequencies. The particular interest is to correlate the size of oil domains (and later percolation) with the permittivity of the phantom. The images taken by CLSM microscope are segmented to estimate the diameter of the droplets and their distribution in the focal plane of the microscope.

Tags: Microscopy, model organisms and tissues