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Autofluorescence insensitive imaging using upconverting nanocrystals in scattering media

2008; American Institute of Physics; Volume: 93; Issue: 17 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1063/1.3005588

1520-8842

Can T. Xu, Nils‐Olof Svensson, Johan Axelsson, Pontus Svenmarker, Gabriel Somesfalean, Guanying Chen, Huijuan Liang, Haichun Liu, Zhiguo Zhang, Stefan Andersson‐Engels,

Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques

Autofluorescence is a nuisance in the field of fluorescence imaging and tomography of exogenous molecular markers in tissue, degrading the quality of the collected data. In this letter, we report autofluorescence insensitive imaging using highly efficient upconverting nanocrystals (NaYF4:Yb3+∕Tm3+) in a tissue phantom illuminated with near-infrared radiation of 85mW∕cm2. It was found that imaging with such nanocrystals leads to an exceptionally high contrast compared to traditional downconverting fluorophores due to the absence of autofluorescence. Upconverting nanocrystals may be envisaged as important biological markers for tissue imaging purposes.