ABSTRACT

Fluorescence detection has been employed for a range of spectroscopy and imaging applications in biomedicine, owing to the high sensitivity and selectivity (Lakowicz 2006) inherent in the techniques. Applications of uorescence sensing in biomedicine include cell sorting (Kumar and Borth 2012), cell viability assays (Darzynkiewicz et al. 1994), cell function (Lippincott-Schwartz 2011), uorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) (Roy et  al. 2008), and DNA analysis (Ansorge 2009), including applications in both animal and human studies (Mycek and Pogue 2003). For clinical applications, tissue uorescence is sensitive to a number of morphological and biochemical changes that occur during disease progression. Fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging techniques have shown signi- cant potential for clinically translatable tissue diagnostics in small animals and humans (Wagnieres et al. 1997, 1998).