Quantitative Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectra of the Cortical Sarcoma and the Adjacent Normal Tissue Determined with an in vivo Experimental Method and Theoretical Model

Abstract

In this paper, a time-resolved fluorescence spectrum method is proposed to study the difference between the cortical sarcoma and the adjacent normal tissue. This is a fluorescence-light-intensity-independent method, which makes it more reliable in the presence of interference light emitted by nonfluorescent light absorbers and scatterers. In the implementation, a model of the tumor tissue and a model of light transport in turbid media using improved Monte Carlo simulations are proposed. In this method, the time-resolved fluorescence is collected in vivo. The improved theoretical model can interpret the fluorescence lifetime measurement. The simulation results show that the decay constant of the tumor tissue spectrum is larger than that of the adjacent normal tissue because of hypoxia and haperplasia, which fits the theoretical analysis very well.