Patent ID: 8309346

Claim:
An apparatus for non-destructively evaluating the functional capacity of a living human tissue in situ in an intact living human being, comprising: a component configured to stimulate a resting tissue to change its metabolism and become a stimulated tissue using a light stimulus; a light source configured to irradiate the resting and stimulated tissue with continuous linearly polarized excitation light sufficient to cause endogenous lipoamide dehydrogenase (LipDH) to fluoresce; a module configured to resolve the fluorescence of LipDH in the resting tissue into a first set of vector components and the fluorescence of LipDH in the stimulated tissue into a second set of vector components, wherein the first and second sets of vector components are parallel and perpendicular to a plane of polarization of the excitation light; and a computing device configured to: determine a resting fluorescence anisotropy of the resting tissue from the first set of vector components and a stimulated fluorescence anisotropy of the stimulated tissue from the second set of vector components; construct a resting fluorescence anisotropy map based on the resting fluorescence anisotropy and a stimulated fluorescence anisotropy map based on the stimulated fluorescence anisotropy; determine a functional capacity of the tissue by subtracting point by point or pixel by pixel the resting fluorescence anisotropy map from the stimulated fluorescence anisotropy map over the entire maps or within areas of interest; and compare the functional capacity of the tissue to a database of normal metabolic levels obtained from a control tissue similarly evaluated to identify dysfunctional areas in the tissue.