Patent ID: 7809431

Claim:
A method of optically imaging at least one biological tissue, the method comprising: a) introducing at least one fluorescent marker into said at least one tissue; b) exciting said at least one marker by incident light radiations and detecting bands of emission relating to fluorescence emitted by said at least one marker in response to that excitation; and c) analyzing intensities of fluorescence relative to said emission bands, wherein the step b) includes, sequentially exciting said at least one marker at n different incident excitation wavelengths λ i , said at least one marker excitable by at least two of these n wavelengths λ i and to emit in response to each wavelength λ i a series S i of m simultaneous emission bands B j having m different maximum wavelengths λ′ j that are substantially same from one series S i to another (where n and m are independent integers equal to or greater than 2 and where i and j respectively vary from 1 to n and from 1 to m), and detecting at least two of the series S i that each comprise the m bands B j emitted simultaneously in order to deduce therefrom in the step c) at least one of an estimate of a three-dimensional location of said marker in the at least one tissue and mean absorption coefficients of the at least one tissue for the excitation wavelengths λ i .