UHN’s biophotonics group has developed a fiberoptic probe that quantitatively measures the fluorescence in tissue for in-vivo surgical applications which compensate for the effects of tissue optical property variations.

One of the major difficulties in using fluorescence for medical diagnostics and therapeutics is quantifying the fluorescence in tissue. Fluorescence signals are strongly affected by variations in the tissue optical properties whereas the objective of the clinician is often to quantify the fluorescence based on fluorophore concentration alone. This is important for applications which rely on fluorescence signal to determine whether fluorophore-tagged pathologic tissue have been completely removed through a resection technique, while leaving native adjacent tissue intact. This is particularly important for brain cancer (i.e. glioma) resections as an example, but has other applications in fluorescence diagnosis of disease states, evaluation of drug biodistribution in clinical and pre-clinical trials, and photodynamic therapy applications.

The developed system includes an in-vivo fiberoptic probe and back-end hardware and software that measures spectroscopic fluorescence signals and tissue optical properties and calibrates and corrects for distortions to give a robust quantitative measurement of fluorescence.

The device is currently in clinical trials for glioma resections at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Centre in New Hampshire) and is available for exclusive world-wide licensing and co-development.

File Number: 9085 

Web site: http://www.uhnresearch.ca/tdc/featured_technolo...

Disease: Cancer

Other Information: Inventors: B. Wilson, A. Kim