Fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) is a technique to visualize the lifetimes of the fluorescent samples in an image by fitting the exponential decay. Each voxel of a FLIM image represents an autofluorescence lifetime corresponding to the excited molecule located in the specified voxel. The lifetimes correlate with the metabolism of the coenzymes. Therefore, alterations of metabolism that appears in tumor cells can be visualized by FLIM.
Photo: Fluorescence lifetime Image of tulipa pollen recorded by the multiphoton tomograph MPTflex