Several phantom and in vivo small animal imaging studies have been performed to detect the re-emitted fluorescence signal arising from micro to pico molar concentrations of fluorophore by employing band-pass and band-rejection filters. However, elimination of the back-reflected excitation light still remains a major challenge for further reducing the noise floor in fluorescence imaging. Furthermore, despite the well-known deterioration of interference filter performance as the angle of incidence deviates from zero degrees, most studies do not employ collimated light optical design required for efficient excitation light rejection using interference filters. In this study, we measured quantities in frequency domain data for the combination of three-cavity interference and holographic super notch filters. To assess excitation leakage, the “out-of-band (S (λx ) )” to “in-band (S (λm ) - S (λx ) )” signal ratio, AC amplitude (IAC ), and phase delay (δ-δ*) measured from a gain modulated, intensified CCD imaging system with and without collimating optics was evaluated. The addition of collimating optics resulted in a reduction of 82% to 91% of the out-of-band to in-band ratio for the phantom studies and an increase of 1.4 to 3.7 times of the target-to-background ratio (T:B) for small animal studies.
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