The emerging discipline is in constant development, using light and other forms of electromagnetic energy, usually in the visible range, in order to understand the internal components of cells and tissues of living organisms. Biomedical optics is interdisciplinary since it covers all aspects of optical imaging and spectroscopy from subcellular length scales to large tissue volumes and attract researchers and users of optical physics, biophysics, biochemistry, engineering, biology, medicine, mathematics and computer science.
In medicine it focuses on tissue and blood to detect, diagnose and treat diseases non-invasively.