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

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.