Experimental Study of Effect of Medium Boundary on Light Distribution in Tissue Phantoms

An experimental method for investigating the effect of medium boundary on distributions of light in the biological tissue phantom intralipid is presented. Measurements of distributions of light in intralipid-10% suspensions at 633nm are described, in which a narrow collimated beam is incident on the surface of the phantoms and into the different depths inside of the phantoms. The experimental results show that the effect of the boundary of the medium on the curves geometry of light distributions is trivial, but the effect on intensity of scattering light is obvious, the maximal relative change of the energy fluence reaches 53.8 % and the position of the peak of the energy fluence curve has a shift of 1.1mm in the reverse direction of incident light for the phantom with albedo a = 0.998, and the effect of the boundary is decreased with the increase of the absorption coefficients of tissue phantoms. The experimental results were analysed by the diffusion theory. These studies will be helpful for further understandings of the relation between the boundary of biological tissue and the distribution of light in tissue.