ABSTRACT
Assessment of biological tissues’ intrinsic fluorescence provides unique perspectives for the development of new methods of optical noninvasive diagnostics for application in many fields of medicine. Fluorescence techniques alone or together with other biophotonics methods have found their application in oncology, surgery, dermatology, etc. This chapter provides an overview of research conducted in the field of noninvasive assessment of cutaneous fluorescence for the detection and assessment of the severity of complications of diabetes mellitus (DM). A detailed review of studies assessing the accumulation of advanced glycation end products in diabetes using fluorescence as well as studies of other intrinsic fluorophores of human biological tissues in the diabetes clinic is presented. Multimodal studies involving the combination of other biophotonics methods with fluorescence spectroscopy for the analysis of diabetic complications are also considered. The results of the authors’ own studies on the evaluation of the possibility to noninvasively register the fluorescence of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) respiratory chain coenzymes in the skin for further analysis of patient-registered data are presented. Here, we show the developed method of diagnosing complications of DM, combining the analysis of skin fluorescence and the laser Doppler flowmetry signal registered from patients, and experimental studies on its validation.
