A theoretical and experimental examination of fluorescence in enclosed cavities

Photosensitizer fluorescence emitted during photodynamic therapy (PDT) is of interest for monitoring the local concentration of the photosensitizer and its photobleaching. In this study, we use Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to evaluate the relationship between treatment light and fluorescence, both collected by an isotropic detector placed on the surface of the tissue. In treatment of the thoracic and peritoneal cavities, the light source position changes continually. The MC program is designed to simulate an infinitely broad photon beam incident on the tissue at various angles to determine the effect of angle. For each of the absorbed photons, a fixed number of fluorescence photons are generated and traced. The theoretical results from the MC simulation show that the angle theta has little effect on both the measured fluorescence and the ratio of fluorescence to diffuse reflectance. However, changes in the absorption and scattering coefficients, μa and μ's do cause the fluorescence and ratio to change, indicating that a correction for optical properties will be needed for absolute fluorescence quantification. Experiments in tissue-simulating phantoms confirm that an empirical correction can accurately recover the sensitizer concentration over a physiologically relevant range of optical properties.