Abstract

Spectroscopic measurements are sensitive to differences in the chemical structure of tissues. Fluorescence excitation- emission matrices (EEMs) can be used to differentiate normal and diseased tissues.¹ However, only limited attempts have been made to quantitatively extract chemical information from tissue spectra,² as this task is difficult in turbid, multicomponent tissues. Previous work suggests that rank annihilation is well suited to extracting information from EEMs of multicomponent mixtures.³ Because this technique requires little prior knowledge about the components of the sample, it could be invaluable to the study of tissue fluorescence. Unfortunately, current rank annihilation methods require that data be obtained from dilute solutions. We have developed an extension of rank annihilation to analyze data from turbid samples.

© 1992 Optical Society of America