SPIS collaborated with the NICHD Program in Physical Biology to develop a Lifetime Fluorescence Imaging system.  With certain fluorophores, the fluorescence emission lifetime changes in response to changes in the immediate tissue environment.  This instrument was developed to quantify these changes in lifetime to investigate whether this method could be used as an effective non-invasive early-stage tumor detection system.  SPIS was responsible for instrumentation hardware specification and integration.  SPIS also developed the software for instrument control and data acquisition. The instrument has been actively utilized in the laboratory for ten years, resulting in at least four NIH journal publications in the past five years.