Identification of high-risk atherosclerotic plaques: a survey of spectroscopic methods

The powerful spectroscopic tools described above are highly likely to be of use in the essential clinical task of identifying vulnerable plaque. It is probable that some combination of the methods, in the long term will be the most useful. During the next 3 to 5 years, we believe the greatest clinical utility will be derived from diffuse NIR spectroscopy, which faces fewer hurdles in implementation than do NMR (which requires extensive complex equipment), Raman spectroscopy (which faces signal-to-noise challenges), and fluorescence spectroscopy (which is limited by reflectance and scattering).