Preparation of a skin equivalent phantom with interior micron-scale vessel structures for optical imaging experiments.

A popular alternative of preparing multilayer or microfluidic chip based phantoms could have helped to simulate the subsurface vascular network, but brought inevitable problems. In this work, we describe the preparation method of a single layer skin equivalent tissue phantom containing interior vessel channels, which mimick the superficial microvascular structure. The fabrication method does not disturb the optical properties of the turbiding matrix material. The diameter of the channels reaches a value of 50 μm. The size, as well as the geometry of the generated vessel structures are investigated by using the SD-OCT system. Our preliminary results confirm that fabrication of such a phantom is achievable and reproducible. Prospectively, this phantom is used to calibrate the optical angiographic imaging approaches.