Use of folic acid nanosensors with excellent photostability for hybrid imaging.

Sentinel lymph node (SLN) mapping and tumor-boundary delineation play a key role in cancer surgery, as they have great potential to reduce surgical intervention and increase relapse-free survival rates of patients. The autofluorescence imaging (AFI) method can improve the efficiency of tumor delineation and optimize the scope of surgical intervention, but there are still no fluorescent drugs that can be used with such a method to form a hybrid imaging technique. Another problem is bleaching when fluorescent dyes are conjugated with folic acid.