Tissue mimicking materials in image-guided needle-based interventions: A review

Image-guided interventions are widely employed in clinical medicine, which brings significant revolution in healthcare in recent years. However, it is impossible for medical trainees to experience the image-guided interventions physically in patients due to the lack of certificated skills. Therefore, training phantoms, which are normally tissue mimicking materials, are widely used in medical research, training, and quality assurance. This review focuses on the tissue mimicking materials used in image-guided needle-based interventions. In this case, we need to investigate the microstructure characteristics and mechanical properties (for needle intervention), optical properties and acoustical properties (for imaging) of these training phantoms to compare with the related properties of human real tissues. The widely used base materials, additives and the corresponding concentrations of the training phantoms are summarized from the literatures in recent ten years. The microstructure characteristics, mechanical behavior, optical properties and acoustical properties of the tissue mimicking materials are investigated, accompanied with the common experimental methods, apparatus and theoretical algorithm. The influence of the concentrations of the base materials and additives on these characteristics are compared and classified. In this review, we assess a comprehensive overview of the existing techniques with the main accomplishments, and limitations as well as recommendations for tissue mimicking materials used in image-guided needle-based interventions.