Combination of analytical and experimental optical clearing of rodent specimen for detecting beta-carotene: phantom...

Recently, compression optical clearing (OC) was applied to detect dermal carotenoid using reflection spectroscopy. To enhance the precision and accuracy of reflection spectroscopy to better detect the spectral absorption of beta-carotene inside biological phantom, here, we simultaneously use compression and immersion OC using dimethyl sulfoxide. In addition, we analytically extract the absorption coefficient of beta-carotene using diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (as an analytical OC). Our results show that the presented analytical OC can be applied alone as a noninvasive method to measure cutaneous chromophores at deep tissues. Finally, we also improve the ability of the analytical clearing method mediated with experimental OC. Our result demonstrates that the combination of analytical and experimental clearing methods enhance the ability of diffuse reflection spectroscopy for extracting the absorption coefficient of beta-carotene as one of the chromospheres inside biological phantom.