A compact Cobolt laser was utilized in a light sheet scheme to perform rapid 2D and 3D Raman imaging with acquisition speeds up to 4 orders of magnitude faster than confocal micro-spectroscopy.

Raman spectroscopy provides information about the chemical composition of materials, cells and tissues. The Raman process is induced by scattering of the excitation light with the vibration of the molecules contained in the sample. This provides an intrinsic label-free contrast mechanism from the sample that is rich in biochemical content. Taking 2D information of the molecular distribution that conforms the sample is thus, very attractive to the biomedical science community.