Patent ID: 8219183

Claim:
An apparatus for generating sectional images of tissue, comprising: a catheter having a first light-conducting fiber rotatably accommodated within a catheter tube; a rotational drive device arranged to selectively rotate the first light-conducting fiber; a first device optically coupled to transmit primary light of a predetermined first wavelength range into the first light-conducting fiber and to receive reflected primary light transmitted via the first light-conducting fiber, the first device configured to generate sectional tissue images according to the optical coherence tomography principle; a second device optically coupled to transmit secondary light of a predetermined second wavelength range and a third device optically coupled to receive reflected secondary light and generate tissue images from the reflected secondary light, the second device or the third device being connected to the first light-conducting fiber; an image-generating device configured to generate an overall image containing the image data of the sectional tissue images and images of tissue, and a cycle-generating device electrically coupled to temporally alternate between an operation of the first device and an operation of the second device or the first device and third device, wherein the second wavelength range is selected such that predetermined fluorophores are thereby excitable to generate fluorescent light.