ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to provide students with exposure and hands-on laboratory experience with the main modalities of biological tissue spectroscopy. Tissue spectroscopy is one of the vibrant research areas within biophotonics. Its significance stems from the practical applications of spectroscopy in tissue diagnostics as well as the wealth of information it may provide to better our understanding of fundamental biology. The term spectroscopy simply means that a particular type of light–matter interaction is observed as a function of the wavelength of light. The key concept of tissue spectroscopy is that, at least in principle, essentially any type of light–matter interaction can be translated into a spectroscopic modality. Depending on the modality, different properties of tissue can be elucidated. The general strategy is to measure the spectrum of light interacting in a certain way with tissue and analyze the spectrum in order to extract quantitative information about particular tissue properties, whether this is tissue structure or chemical composition.
