Patent ID: 7525654

Claim:
A chemical imaging system comprising: a tunable light source; a light delivery medium for delivering light of a specific tuned wavelength from said tunable light source to a sample ,wherein said light delivery medium ends in one or more terminals for illuminating said sample; one or more reference detectors for detecting the intensity ratio of said tuned light at said tunable light source and at one or more points along said light delivery medium and at said one or more terminals of said light delivery medium; a detector, for detecting light reflected from or transmitted through said sample; a controller for tuning said tunable light source in a pre-determined pattern; and a data collection device for collecting and storing information from said detector, wherein said controller and said data collection device normalize said stored information with respect to any combination of reference value readings from said one or more reference detectors, and provide light source intensity normalization such that each plane or wavelength of data within a spectral hypercube is normalized to the reference value.