Fluorescence excitation and propagation through brain phantom gelatins: measurements and potential applications

We have investigated the utility of 0.6% agarose gels as surrogate materials for brain tissues in optical propagation studies for possible diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Centimeter-scale layers of the gel exhibited a Beer's law attenuation factor, δ, of ≈0.2 mm−1 for incident illumination via a pulsed LED (100 Hz) at 405 nm. This result was different by only about a factor of 3 from the effective penetration depth at similar wavelengths through in vitro samples of the gray (cortical) matter of human brain, as measured by others. Then, films of the thermographic phosphors La2O2S:Eu, Mg4FGeO6:Mn, YAG:Cr and variants of the latter were formed on aluminum substrates and the fluorescence of these samples was stimulated and observed through layers of the gel up to 4 cm thick. In all cases, the fluorescence was easily excited and distinguishable above the background. The results demonstrate that this gel might serve as an inexpensive and robust test bed for exploratory studies of neurological modalities involving propagation of optical signals within brain tissues