Applications in Medicine

Abstract

Raman scattering is a vibrational spectroscopic technique that can both fingerprint components of biological and biomedical species and identify polymorphs of crude mixtures, extracts, cells and chromosomes (Spiro, 1987). By coupling an optical microscope to a conventional Raman spectrometer, the technique becomes a microprobe with a spatial resolution of less than 1 μm, determined by the wavelength of the radiation and the numerical aperture of the microscope objective (cf. Chapter 2).