Abstract
Spectral imaging is a technology that integrates conventional imaging and spectroscopy to get both spatial and spectral information from an object. Although this technology was originally developed for remote sensing, it has been extended to the biomedical engineering field as a powerful analytical tool for biological and biomedical research. This review introduces the basics of spectral imaging, imaging methods, current equipment, and recent advances in biomedical applications. The performance and analytical capabilities of spectral imaging systems for biological and biomedical imaging are discussed. In particular, the current achievements and limitations of this technology in biomedical engineering are presented. The benefits and development trends of biomedical spectral imaging are highlighted to provide the reader with an insight into the current technological advances and its potential for biomedical research.
Highlights
Spectral imaging is known as imaging spectroscopy, which refers to the technology that integrates conventional imaging and spectroscopy methods to obtain both spatial and spectral information of an object
Spectral imaging can be divided into multispectral imaging, hyperspectral imaging (HSI), and ultraspectral imaging according to its spectral resolution, number of bands, width, and contiguousness of bands
The spectral imaging data can be visualized as a three-dimensional (3-D) cube or a stack of multiple two-dimensional (2-D) images because of its intrinsic structure, in which the cube face is a function of the spatial coordinates and the depth is a function of wavelength
Summary
Spectral imaging is known as imaging spectroscopy, which refers to the technology that integrates conventional imaging and spectroscopy methods to obtain both spatial and spectral information of an object. The spectral imaging technology can be extended to the biomedical engineering field to estimate the physiological status of biological tissues, since it can take advantage of the spatial relationships among the different spectra in a neighborhood. This technology opens new prospects for life science by which scientists can identify and quantify the relationships among biologically active molecules, observe living organisms noninvasively, perform histopathological and fluorescent analyses, and enhance biological understanding of diseases. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of biomedical spectral imaging reported previously and to identify fundamental and applied research issues that occurred in the current and future biomedical applications
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