Professor Maarten Kuijk from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is coordinator of the CoDaFlight project. We have interviewed him about the importance of Fluorescence Lifetime, the reason why he has initiated the CoDaFlight project, and what his expectations are.
Why is fluorescence lifetime important?
Well, I think fluorescence lifetime is very interesting, first of all everybody knows most normal cameras with normal cameras you see what you see but with fluorescence you see a lot of other things that reveal things in the tissue of the body that you cannot see with normal cameras.
Now there is fluorescence but there’s also fluorescence lifetime and that’s the delay with which the light comes back and that is revealing yet a lot of other topics that we cannot see with the bare eye or with the normal camera. So, it’s really exciting, it is with the camera like we can see normal images suddenly we can see a lot of other things that we cannot see with the bare eye.
Why did you decide to found the CoDaFlight project?
Well, we see a lot of proof that fluorescent lifetime will make a difference or could make a difference in the field of fluorescence guided surgery but everybody is working on its own island and by grouping the people that are really experts in the field, the relevant different types of group we can make a coherent, a congruent effort to improve the state-of the-art in using fluorescent lifetime in practice.
Which achievements do you expect?
So, first of all we want to improve our technology a lot on the camera side, on the fluorophore side, on that imaging that use structured light we want to improve that a lot so that we can get full benefit out of the outcome of this project but also what we hope is that with the several systems, several use cases that we are trying out that at least one, maybe two, will be so good or so interesting that we can built on the results that we get in this project for further improvement and for further realization in the field and on the longer term.