Patent ID: 7596404

Claim:
A method for chemical imaging to determine tissue margins during surgery comprising: irradiating, with a substantially monochromatic light, a region containing a biological tissue; obtaining a Raman spectroscopic image from the irradiated region for at least one Raman spectroscopic value characteristic of either a neoplastic portion or a non-neoplastic portion in the region containing the biological tissue, wherein said Raman spectroscopic image comprises spectral information recorded at each pixel in the image; differentiating a boundary between the neoplastic portion and the non-neoplastic portion in the region containing the biological tissue, wherein said differentiating comprises analyzing said spectral information recorded at each pixel of said Raman spectroscopic image using a method selected from the group consisting of: principal component analysis (PCA), Cosine Correlation Analysis (CCA), Euclidian Distance Analysis (EDA), multivariate curve resolution (MCR), Band T. Entropy Method (BTEM), Mahalanobis Distance (MD), Adaptive Subspace Detector (ASD), and combinations thereof; displaying a location of said boundary in said Raman spectroscopic image based on the results of the differentiating and selecting the neoplastic portion for physical manipulation, wherein said selecting is based on the displayed boundary location between the neoplastic portion and the non-neoplastic portion.