Multimodal imaging for tissue diagnostics by combined two-photon and Raman microscopy

During my PhD, I designed and developed a custom-made multimodal microscope for combining Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM), Second Harmonic Generation (SHG), Two-Photon Excited Fluorescence (TPEF) and Raman microscopy for studying both tumour and non-tumour diseases. Then, I conducted three research studies based on the biomedical applications of these optical techniques. I used two-photon microscopy for examining ex vivo human carotids affected by atherosclerosis, and Raman spectroscopy for discriminating three in vitro melanoma cell lines. Moreover, I combined TPEF and Raman microscopy for studying two ex vivo “bulk” tissue types: human bladder affected by urothelial carcinoma (UC) and atherosclerotic aorta obtained from an animal model. Both two-photon and Raman microscopy proved to be valuable tools for analysing biological samples.