Significance. Quantifying human milk composition is important for daily nutritional management in neonatal intensive cares worldwide. Photonic solutions based on visible light can potentially aid in this analysis, as energy content of human milk depends largely on fat content, and the optical scattering properties of human milk predominantly depend on the size and concentration of fat globules. However, it is expected that human milk scattering changes upon homogenization, routinely done before analysis, which may affect fat globule size. Aim. The first aim of this study was to investigate how the most common homogenization methods (gently inverting by hand, vortexing, and sonication) affect the optical properties of human milk. The second aim was to estimate the scattering contribution of casein micelles, the second most dominant scatterers in human milk. Approach. We combined diffuse reflectance spectroscopy with spectroscopic optical coherence tomography to measure the scattering coefficient μs, reduced scattering coefficient Results. Sonication induced the strongest changes in μs, Conclusions. The scattering properties of human milk strongly depend on the homogenization method that is employed, and gentle inversion should be the preferred method. The contribution of casein micelles was relatively small for μs and g but considerably larger for |
![Lens.org Logo](/images/Lens.org/lens-logo.png)
CITATIONS
Cited by 6 scholarly publications.
Scattering
Light scattering
Mie scattering
Homogenization
Anisotropy
Optical properties
Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy