Optical technologies for intraoperative neurosurgical guidance

Biomedical optics is a broadly interdisciplinary field at the interface of optical engineering, biophysics, computer science, medicine, biology, and chemistry, helping us understand light-tissue interactions to create applications with diagnostic and therapeutic value in medicine. Implementation of biomedical optics tools and principles has had a notable scientific and clinical resurgence in recent years in the neurosurgical community. This is in great part due to work in fluorescence-guided surgery of brain tumors leading to reports of significant improvement in maximizing the rates of gross-total resection. Multiple additional optical technologies have been implemented clinically, including diffuse reflectance spectroscopy and imaging, optical coherence tomography, Raman spectroscopy and imaging, and advanced quantitative methods, including quantitative fluorescence and lifetime imaging. Here we present a clinically relevant and technologically informed overview and discussion of some of the major clinical implementations of optical technologies as intraoperative guidance tools in neurosurgery.