Journal of the Optical Society of America B
Photon-echo spectroscopy on biological systems I Application to tissues
Akira Furusawa, Takayuki Suga, Kiyoshi Uchikawa
Abstract
The fluorescence detection technique of incoherent accumulated photon echo is applied to the investigation of animal and human tissues. The correlation between the kind of animal tissue and the dephasing time is determined. The dephasing times of normal and cancerous human tissues are measured by this technique. The cancer tissues exhibit shorter dephasing times than the normal tissues, and this is interpreted as being caused by the large number of conformational substates of cancer tissues. The dephasing time of a benign-tumor tissue is also measured and shows a value similar to that of the normal tissue. The dephasing time of a metastasizing cancer region is also measured. The applicability of photon-echo spectroscopy to diagnosis is noted.