An Alternative Approach to Analyze Fluorescence Lifetime Images as a Base for a Tumor Early Diagnosis System

Fluorescence lifetime imaging is a very promising imaging method for early detection of malignant tumors. It offers many advantages over conventional fluorescence methods, especially because the acquired signal does not rely on the fluorophore concentration in the tissue. As in all imaging method, the goal is to determine the exact location of a malignant tumor. However, since we are dealing with optical imaging, the inverse problem, i.e., extracting the tumor location coordinates is not an easy task to fulfill. In this paper, we describe an alternative method of interpreting the fluorescence lifetime image. The method extracts four features from each decay curve. We show that from these features one can extract the location of the tumor. The theoretical model is compared to the experimental results obtained from tissue-like phantoms.