As a conventional, low cost, and highly sensitive approach for specifying the basic optical properties in biological tissues such as absorption, scattering, fluorescence, reflection, refraction, and anisotropy, optical spectroscopy has been attracting the attention of clinicians and biologists over recent years. The capabilities of light to penetrate, disperse, interact, and escape out of a turbid medium permit therapeutic evaluation of biological tissue in various ways. Moreover, the utilizations of advanced techniques, such as dynamic scattering, Raman scattering, resonance, coherence, diffraction, and tomographic/imaging methods have created the possibility for differentiating healthy and diseased tissues with a wide range of targets.

To promote the latest advances in exploring spectroscopic and tomographic/imaging methods for probing biological tissues, we invite the submission of original research or review articles to this special issue. The articles would report new principles, technologies, data analysis approaches, or applications of optical spectroscopy and its derived tomography/imaging for use in medicine and biology.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Optical absorption spectroscopy
• Optical emission spectroscopy
• Elastic scattering spectroscopy
• Near infrared spectroscopy (reflectance or transmittance)
• Diffuse optical imaging
• Vibration spectroscopy (infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and microscopy)
• Optical coherent spectroscopy and tomography
• Nonlinear optical spectroscopy
• Fluorescence spectroscopy and tomography
• Photoacoustic spectroscopy and tomography
• Photon correlation spectroscopy (fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, diffuse correlation spectroscopy, and photon cross-correlation spectroscopy)
• Optical resonance spectroscopy
• Phase conjugation spectroscopy
• Laser diffraction spectroscopy