Biological and medical applications of near-infrared spectrometry

Near infrared (IR) spectrometry is characterized by low molar absorptivities and high scattering efficiency which permit nearly effortless evaluation of pure materials and broad overlapping bands. It diminishes the demand for a large number of wavelengths for calibration and analysis. Near-IR spectrometry is now being applied in the areas of biomedical and pharmaceutical research and in the biotechnology industry for nondestructive analysis of small quantities of expensive materials. New developments in near-IR optics and instrumentation which make an effective biomedical near-IR spectrometry are presented. New computational research results in parallel supercomputing for near-IR imaging are also described.