Near Infrared Spectroscopy in Medical Diagnosis

Dear Colleagues,

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an optical technique allowing to investigate the optical properties of biological tissues, namely, the absorption coefficient and diffusion coefficient. In particular, from the absorption coefficient, it is possible to extract information about tissue composition, while from the diffusion coefficient, we have information about tissue microstructure. There are three main approaches for the implementation of NIRS: continuous-wave (CW), frequency-domain (FD), and time-domain (TD). Each of these approaches has its peculiarities, with advantages and disadvantages. In general, however, thanks to its non-invasiveness, its capabilities to penetrate the biological tissues in depth (some centimeters), and technological progresses in optical components, allowing the realization of more and more compact and cheap systems, NIRS is more and more applied in the clinical environment, also in the imaging version. The organs or compartments that have been investigated with NIRS range from the brain cortex, to breast, muscles, bone, heart, lung, etc. Typically, the main aim of these studies is to characterize a healthy condition, in order to find fingerprints that could identify and distinguish it from a pathological one, allowing in this way the diagnosis of some disease. This Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences, “Near Infrared Spectroscopy in Medical Diagnosis” is dedicated to reporting recent advances in the exploitation of NIRS, regardless of the approach (CW, FD, TD), as a diagnostic tool in medical applications. To this respect, of great relevance is the problem of performance standardization for clinically-oriented NIRS systems. Contributions on this issue are also welcome.

Dr. Lorenzo Spinelli
Guest Editor

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