Two applications of solid phantoms in performance assessment of optical coherence tomography systems

Virtual tissues (phantoms) are widely used for performance evaluation of imaging systems. Specific design of the phantom is necessary for the correct assessment of a system's parameters. In an effort to reduce the amount of time and energy spent making application-oriented phantoms, we describe procedures to make epoxy-resin solid phantoms based on Mie scattering theory, with two different scatterers: polystyrene and gold microspheres. The phantoms are specifically designed to be used in two applications: (a) the gold microspheres solid phantoms are used to estimate the point-spread function (PSF) of an optical coherence tomography (OCT) system, and (b) the polystyrene solid phantom are used to evaluate the performance of an OCT-images optical properties extraction (OPE) algorithm. Phantoms with differing combination of materials have been tested to achieve the most suitable combination for producing an accurate PSF for application (a) and a valid evaluation/parameter optimization of the algorithm in application (b). An en face time-domain dynamic focus OCT is used for imaging.