Towards In-Vivo Biopsy

A new method to detect and distinguish between different types of fluorescent materials. The suggested technique has provided a dramatically larger depth range compared to previous methods; thus it enables medical diagnosis of body tissues without removing the tissue from the body, which is the current medical standard. It uses fluorescent probes, which are commonly used in medical diagnosis. One of these parameters is the fluorescence lifetime, that is the average time the fluorescence emission lasts. The new method can distinguish between different fluorescence lifetimes, which allows diagnosis of deep tissues. Locating fluorescence probes in the body using this method can, for example, indicate the location of a tumor in deep tissue, and classify it as malignant or benign according to the fluorescence lifetime, thus eliminating the need for X-ray or biopsy.