Development of Highly Robust Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Technology

Abstract

A noninvasively and endoscopically diagnosis technology called Optical Biopsy has a limitation in the clinical application because of the motion-artifact caused by the external disturbance of the tissue and the endoscope. In this research, we are aiming to develop a spectroscopic and robust fluorescence lifetime imaging with the external disturbance compensating system. The fluorescence lifetime is estimated by the histogram of the arrival times of each single photon emitted from the sample. In principle, the fluorescence decay waveform and lifetime are varied due to the external disturbance such as the vibration because of the optical path change resulting in the change of the arrival time of the photons. Therefore, we proposed a tissue motion tracking method to compensate the signal distortion by moving the mirror to follow the surface of the tissue. In this presentation, the validity of the proposed method for the highly robust fluorescence lifetime measurement is reported.