Fluorescence Spectroscopy

Abstract

Fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely employed technique in chemical and biomedical applications for noninvasive specimen interrogation and monitoring that can be performed on both living and stained/sectioned samples (Lakowicz 2006). A variety of spectroscopic techniques have been developed for fluorescence applications in quantitative clinical tissue diagnostics (Pitts and Mycek 2001; Chandra et al. 2009; Pfefer et al. 2003b), including several involving cancer diagnostics (Chandra et al. 2010; Mycek et al. 1998; Volynskaya et al. 2008; Uehlinger et al. 2009). The methods developed for clinical fluorescence tissue sensing serve as an excellent starting point for applications in regenerative medicine, since similar excitation sources, optical delivery systems, and photon detectors can be employed for sensing in tissue-engineered constructs with minimal modifications (Mycek and Pogue 2003). Furthermore, these techniques can be employed to optically measure human tissues, providing the experimental groundwork to study tissue-engineered constructs both during development and in vivo, after human implantation.