Patent Document ID: 20100103250
Application ID: 12524804
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A fluorescence observation apparatus comprising: a light source unit that radiates, onto an observation target site, illumination light in a wavelength band absorbed by a blood vessel, a first excitation light that includes the wavelength band of the illumination light and that excites an autofluorescent substance in the blood vessel to generate autofluorescence, and a second excitation light that excites fluorescent dye that distinguishably stains normal tissue or abnormal tissue, generating agent fluorescence, and that has a different wavelength band from the first excitation light; an image-acquisition unit that obtains images by respectively capturing reflected light obtained by radiating the illumination light, and autofluorescence and agent-fluorescence obtained by radiating the first and second excitation light onto the observation target site; and an image processing unit that extracts a blood-vessel image from a reflected-light image obtained by the image-acquisition unit, that obtains a reference image by applying interpolation to the area in an autofluorescence image that corresponds to the extracted blood-vessel image, and that corrects an agent-fluorescence image obtained by the image-acquisition unit based on the obtained reference image.