Near infrared quadruple wavelength spectrophotometry of the rat head.

A quadruple wavelength method to monitor the changes in concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin and the redox state of cytochrome oxidase within a living tissue is presented. The expected advantages of this technique over the triple wavelength method are (i) that it can compensate for the light scattering change of tissue itself or for instabilities of light source and photomultiplier, (ii) that it can treat the optical properties of the red blood cell in a tissue in the same way as in an in vitro model system, and (iii) that it requires no estimation of the absorption coefficient of cytochrome oxidase in situ.