Study on an artificial phenomenon observed in terahertz biological imaging

Terahertz (THz) wave-based imaging of biological samples is an emerging but promising field. In the present work, we report an artificial phenomenon observed in imaging melanoma slices, which can lead to mistakenly interpretation of the experimental results. It was observed that a structure similar to but smaller than the sample contour appeared inside the melanoma slice image. The underlying mechanism of this phenomenon was then investigated both experimentally and theoretically. By imaging a regular standard sample (vinyl coverslip) with a THz time domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) system and reconstructing its images at 0.8 and 1.2 THz, we can clearly observe the afore-mentioned artifacts. The experimental results are highly consistent with the simulations based on the Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction theory in which possible optical aberrations were incorporated. It can be concluded that this artifact was caused by the frequency-dependent diffraction of the sample edge. The work demonstrated here is essential for correct interpretation of the images obtained by the THz-TDS technique.