Light propagation in biological media with gold nanoparticles embedded

Abstract

Nanoparticles have been proposed as a solution to current shortcomings both in therapeutic and diagnosis applications. The development of new treatment modalities and optical imaging techniques highlights the need to understand the effect that such nanostructures produce in a biological environment and how they affect the propagation of the optical radiation in the human tissue. In this way, the use of optical models has become an indispensable tool for this purpose. In this work we present an optical model that tries to predict the effect of gold nanoparticles in the optical distribution for three different types of malignant skin tumors. The results obtained allow us to know the absorption of the optical radiation in order to compare the total energy accumulated in the target tissue when it has nanoparticles embedded and without them. Differences were observed between several types of tumors. This demonstrates the need to know not only the optical properties of the nanostructures but also the biological environment where they are incorporated.