In this work, we revise the preparation procedure and conduct an in depth characterization of optical properties for the recently proposed silicone-based tissue-mimicking optical phantoms in the spectral range from 475 to 925 nm. The optical properties are characterized in terms of refractive index and its temperature dependence, absorption and reduced scattering coefficients and scattering phase function related quantifiers. The scattering phase function and related quantifiers of the optical phantoms are first assessed within the framework of the Mie theory by using the measured refractive index of SiliGlass and size distribution of the hollow silica spherical particles that serve as scatterers. A set of purely absorbing optical phantoms in cuvettes is used to evaluate the linearity of the absorption coefficient with respect to the concentration of black pigment that serves as the absorber. Finally, the optical properties in terms of the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients and the subdiffusive scattering phase function quantifier γ are estimated for a subset of phantoms from spatially resolved reflectance using deep learning aided inverse models. To this end, an optical fiber probe with six linearly arranged optical fibers is used to collect the backscattered light at small and large distances from the source fiber. The underlying light propagation modeling is based on the stochastic Monte Carlo method that accounts for all the details of the optical fiber probe.
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