Optical imaging holds great promise for the early-stage detection of diseases. It plays an important role in the process of protecting the patient’s health. Most of the organic dyes suffer due to photobleaching, light scattering, short light penetration depth, and autofluorescence of specimen, thus, need to be replaced with alternative nanoprobes emitting light in the optical biological window (700–1350 nm). The group of candidates which can challenged described problems are colloidal quantum dots (e.g. CdSe and PbS) and upconverting nanocrystals (e.g. NaGdF₄:Er, Yb). This paper presents comprehensive and systematic studies of the aforementioned probes, using specially designed tissue phantom, and custom-built wide-field fluorescence microscope. We investigated how the absorption and scattering of light at the water, hemoglobin, and intralipid may affect the intensity of luminescence probes and the quality of optical images. We propose a protocol, that could be easily implemented for investigating other nanoprobes that allow for comparison of their optical performance.

光学成像为疾病的早期检测提供了广阔的前景。它在保护患者健康的过程中发挥着重要作用。大多数有机染料由于光漂白、光散射、光穿透深度短和样品的自发荧光而受到影响，因此，需要替换为在光学生物窗口 (700-1350 nm) 中发光的替代纳米探针。可以挑战所述问题的候选组是胶体量子点（例如 CdSe 和 PbS）和上转换纳米晶体（例如 NaGdF ₄：呃，Yb）。本文使用专门设计的组织体模和定制的宽视场荧光显微镜对上述探针进行了全面系统的研究。我们研究了光在水、血红蛋白和脂肪内的吸收和散射如何影响发光探针的强度和光学图像的质量。我们提出了一个协议，该协议可以很容易地用于研究其他纳米探针，以便比较它们的光学性能。