Spectro-temporal studies of Xe---Cl excimer laser-induced arterial wall fluorescence

We report on spectro-temporal fluorescence studies of cadaver femoral arterial walls at different stages in the progression of atherosclerosis. After excitation with a Xe---Cl excimer pulse, the time course of the fluorescence spectrum was recorded over time, and time-resolved multispectral analysis was performed. Then, under the assumption of linearity, we derived a linear spectro-temporal kernel (a weighting function) which describes the temporal behavior of the fluorescence process independently of the pulse width of the photoexcitation. The data analysis revealed both static and dynamic fluorescence characteristics which exhibited a good correlation with histological findings.