Neurosurgery with 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) has been performed nowadays. After oral administration of 5-ALA, protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) is induced and it stays predominantly in malignant glioma cells. PpIX is fluorophore which emits reddish fluorescence when it is excited by blue light.
Standard surgical workflow generally requires illumination switching and it disturbs clinical workflow and sacrifice convenience. Another issue is that the fluorescent image is not quantitative enough. The fluorescence intensity is affected to lighting condition, such as intensity of excitation light, incident angle, and so on.
The intensity distribution of fluorescence should be independent of these lighting and imaging geometry.
We first propose a system overcoming the first problem. Then we formulate the fluorescence imaging and present a processing way for quantitative imaging that is independent the geometry.