Backgrounds removed through time correlated photon counting, to enable high visibility Raman signals without any distal optics, with standard off the shelf fibres, with fast measurement times.
Great work from Caitlin getting this published!
We think this is the first demo of this with realistic measurement times, enabled by multiplexed detection for single shot time resolved spectroscopy. This could be enabling for actually using this in-vivo, in a clinical environment, for endoscopic spectroscopy of tissue. This could be used for many things, including tumour investigations.
Perfectly timed to get published 2 days before Caitlin’s PhD viva, at the end of a productive PhD, linked to the U-Care project thinking about advanced optics and endoscopic systems for healthcare.
https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.560826
In this figure, you see the full time resolved data on the left – where the background from the optical fibre occurs at an earlier measurement time (on nanosecond timescales) than the Raman signal we want from the end of the fibre. On the right you see how the data goes from not being able to see anything other than the fibre background (black trace) to a well recovered Raman spectra of the sample (green trace).
(reproduced from above under CC-BY….)
We also show removal of fluorescence background signals in organic samples. Next would be to see how well it works of biological tissues…..
Also, Caitlin passed her viva right after this!
Tanner Lab 