Noninvasive Raman Imaging for Monitoring Mitochondrial Redox State in Septic Rats

|Raman imaging for a sepsis study is reported here. We propose a confocal resonance Raman microscopic imager (CRRMI) to measure in vivo the redox state of mitochondria over a surface area of a septic rat. The CRRMI has excellent performance with spectral and spatial resolutions of 0.1 nm and 2 (cid:22) m, respectively. It is found that the Raman signal related to the mitochondrial dysfunction in sepsis is abnormally large only locally at many points with some random spatial distribution. Our CRRMI can detect the mitochondrial redox state through the skin of a naturally living rat even without the removal of hairs and overcomes some issues that a pointwise measurement method of Raman signals may encounter when monitoring mitochondrial dysfunction of a sepsis rat, such as the (cid:13)uorescence of hairs, hitting the points without mitochondrial redox metabolic disorder, etc. The present Raman imager can be used for giving an early warning for sepsis. It provides a new method for noninvasive monitoring of mitochondrial redox state in sepsis.