The development of non‐toxic fluorescent agents alternative to heavy metal‐based semiconductor quantum dots represents a relevant topic in biomedical research and in particular in the bioimaging field. Herein, highly luminescent Si─H terminal microporous silicon nanoparticles with μs‐lived photoemission are chemically modified with a two step process and successfully used as label‐free probes for in vivo time‐gated luminescence imaging. In this context, Hydra vulgaris is used as model organism for in vivo study and validity assessment. The application of time gating allows to pursue an effective sorting of the signals, getting rid of the most common sources of noise that are fast‐decay tissue autofluorescence and excitation scattering within the tissue. Indeed, an enhancement by a factor ~ 20 in the image signal‐to‐noise ratio can be estimated.

中文翻译：

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活水蛇息肉中带正电荷的聚-1-赖氨酸涂层的高微孔硅纳米粒子的时间门控发光成像。

替代基于重金属的半导体量子点的无毒荧光剂的开发代表了生物医学研究中的一个相关主题，尤其是在生物成像领域。在此，具有两步法化学修饰了具有μs活性光发射的高发光Si-H末端微孔硅纳米粒子，并成功地用作了体内时控发光成像的无标记探针。在这种情况下，九头蛇用作体内研究和有效性评估的模型生物。时间门控的应用允许对信号进行有效的分类，摆脱最常见的噪声源，即快速衰减的组织自发荧光和组织内的激发散射。确实，可以估计图像信噪比提高20倍。