About This Special Issue
The costs for the health systems - worldwide - explode and it seems that this problem will not be solved easily in the next time.
Recent advances in sensor technology, calibration procedures, microscopy, hyper-spectral classification and post-processing together with a large and increasing number of outstanding research projects indicate the high potential of spectral imaging as an emerging technology.
A new strategy depends on treating the causative agents instead of the treatment of the feature of disease.
The future technology of terahertz using Spectral imaging sensors can acquire hyper-spectral images, images with an additional spectral dimension to the spatial information, providing not only the brightness (monochrome imaging = one channel) or color (RGB-imaging = 3 channels) but an individual spectrum for each pixel (10 up to 1000 bands). This allows acquiring images containing valuable information about the molecular or atomic compositions and structures of the observed materials.
The spectral imaging combined with the fluorescence microscopy allows acquiring the fluorescent spectral fingerprint and morphological spatial information of small molecular and cell nuclei compositions. In this sense the trend in cancer cells diagnosis and stem cell research is to use the fluorescence spectral microscopy to determine the significant spectral information (Fingerprint of each component) to find the relevant information that can be used in building the modern strategy in therapy of illnesses.
Applications range from material inspection, analysis and classification tasks to medical diagnosis. Thus, spectral imaging opens a wide field of applications for scientists and engineers in medicine, agriculture, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, recycling, chemistry, forensic medicine and military fields.
