Spectroscopic Tissue Diagnosis

Overview

The interaction of light with tissue has been used to recognize diseases. The modern advancements of small light sources, detectors, and fiber optic probes offer opportunities to quantitatively determine these interactions, which yield information for diagnosis at the biochemical, structural, or physiological levels within tissues. Nevertheless, because of the strong scattering properties of tissues, the reemitted optical signal is often influenced by changes in biochemistry, as detected by these spectroscopic approaches, and by physiological and pathophysiological changes in tissue scattering. Major challenge of biomedical optics is to separate the signals influenced by biochemistry, which themselves provide specificity for identifying diseased states, from those influenced by tissue scattering, which are typically unspecific to a pathology. In LBRC, we study optical interactions pursued for biomedical applications and then provide an eloquent framework for light interaction based upon tissue absorption and scattering properties.