• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.79-94
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• 2001

The fluorescence emanating from a biological tissue contains information about scattering, absorption and the intrinsic fluorescence (fluorescence only due to fluorophores). Becaue fluorescence spectra of biological tissue are often significantly affected by the presence of tissue absorbers and scatterers, the measured tissue fluorescence cannot be interpreted as a linear combination of intrinsic fluorescence spectra of different tissue biochemical. We conducted experiments to examine the influence of scattering and absorption on the experimentally measured fluorescence of a turbid medium such as biological tissue. Therefore, we acquired fluorescence and reflectance spectra of tissue phantoms with a wide range of scatterer and absorber concentrations. By applying a photon migration model, which uses the scattering and absorption information contained in reflectance spectra to remove their distortion also present in fluorescence spectra, we extract the intrinsic fluorescence of these tissue models. We achieved excellent agreement between modeled and actual intrinsic fluorescence spectra. The motivation for this research is that intrinsic fluorescence spectra are expected to change with progression of disease in human tissue, due to changes in the tissue biochemical composition. It is not possible to distinguish the two tissue types by using only the measured fluorescence, however clear separation can be achieved with the intrinsic fluorescence in real time optical biopsy.