IR fiber optic sensing on biological tissue

A diagnostic method is described to detect differences between diseased and normal tissue from bladder carcinoma by FTIR-microspectroscopy and fiber-optics methods. Regions of interest on 10 μm thin tissue sections were mapped using an IR-microscope in transmission mode. Afterwards the specimens were analyzed using standard pathological techniques. Quadratic discriminant as well as correlation analysis was applied for data analysis. IR optical fibers, not only allowed measurements to be made in the attenuated total reflectance (ATR)-mode but also absorption measurements to be carried out at a remote location. The IR-sensor is in contact with the sample which shows characteristic absorption lines. This method can be used to determine the absorption of a sample in a non-destructive manner. In this paper we report our efforts to develop a fiber-optic infrared sensor to differentiate between malignant and healthy tissue in vivo . Silver halide fibers and a special sensor tip were used for the ATR measurements on human tissue specimens. The results indicate that IR-spectrometry will be a useful tool for bio-diagnostics.