Patent ID: 7598088

Claim:
An optical imaging method for diagnosing pathological tissue in vivo, comprising the steps of: administering a pathology differentiating agent to an examination area of a tissue sample, wherein said pathology differentiating agent provokes a transient alteration in an optical property of said tissue sample; exposing the examination area of the tissue sample to optical radiation; substantially eliminating a relative motion between the tissue sample and an optical head in order to substantially align the spatial points of the examination area of the tissue sample and the optical head; measuring the intensity of light re-emitted from the examination area of the tissue sample with the optical head at various time instances from a start time t 0 until at least a substantial ending time of said transient alteration; for each XY spatial point of the examination area of the tissue sample, computing data representative of the intensity of the light (PV XY ) re-emitted from the XY spatial point in the examination area of the tissue sample versus time to express the kinetics of the provoked alterations in tissue optical properties from the examination area of the tissue sample; calculating at least one dynamic optical property of the tissue in the examination area from the data corresponding to a time extending from about the start time (t 0 ) to at least a relaxation time (t rel ), wherein the relaxation time corresponds to a time at which the intensity of the light attains the value of A/e, where A is a maximum pixel value and e is the base of Neper logarithms; and generating an image of the kinetics of the phenomenon (KI) to express a spatial distribution of the at least one dynamic optical property, the image having pixel values corresponding to each spatial point of the examination area of the tissue sample, wherein the image provides a visual representation for evaluation of the intensity and extent of the provoked transient alteration to diagnose pathological tissue in vivo.