Abstract
In this review, historical background along with some important studies that led to the development of
medical spectroscopy in Japan has been introduced. Great interest among researchers for medical
applications of spectroscopy began with the development of Laser Raman spectroscopy which was then
followed by the progression of FT-IR spectroscopy. Medical spectroscopy field took a quantum leap
when spectrophotometers were combined with microscopes which enabled researchers to investigate at
sub-cellular resolutions and acquire large number of spectra. This resulted in rapid development of
suitable chemometric approaches. Some recent examples on medical applications of Raman spectroscopy
and some routinely used chemometric methods such as SVD, PCA and MCR-ALS have been discussed.
