Development of a multimodal microscope for enhanced clinical diagnoses

在过去的二十年中，出现了广泛的光学成像模式，用于生物学和医学观察组织在建筑（如光学断层扫描技术），细胞（如共聚焦显微镜）或分子（如光谱）水平。与荧光染料、纳米粒子和量子点结合使用的共聚焦显微镜已经允许阐明许多基本的生物途径。然而，在临床世界中，光学成像仅限于自然对比机制，因为很少有造影剂被批准用于人体。尽管有这种限制，共焦内窥镜已经取得了巨大的进展，允许在体内细胞可视化的内部器官，如结肠，子宫颈和声带。通过将反射技术与来自人体组织中天然丰富的弹性蛋白和胶原蛋白等分子的改变信号相结合，可以实现额外的对比度。

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a wide array of optical imaging modalities used in biology and medicine for observing tissues at the architectural (e.g. optical tomography techniques), cellular (e.g. confocal microscopy) or molecular (e.g. spectroscopy) levels. Confocal microscopy used in conjunction with fluorescent dyes, nano-particles and quantum dots has permitted the elucidation of many fundamental biological pathways. However in the clinical world, optical imaging is limited to natural contrast mechanisms as very few contrast agents are approved for use in human. Despite this constraint, confocal endoscopy has already made tremendous progress allowing in vivo cellular visualization of internal organs such as the colon, cervix and vocal folds. Additional contrast could be achieved by combining reflectance techniques with altered signals coming from molecules such as elastin and collagen, which are naturally abundant in human tissues.