Life Science is a very broad scientific term referring to the study of living organisms. A few related sub-fields include biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and medicine. Life science applications aim at understanding how cell function and their place in the ecosystem. The applications of photons in medicine and healthcare, to improve the quality of life, is quickly growing.. Benefits include lower cost prescriptions, the reduced drug abuse, minimally invasive and non-invasive treatments, pain relief, and faster recovery all are only a few. Cancer, immuno-chemistry, pharmacology and neurology are a few medical research areas benefiting from high-resolution imaging using laser scanning microscopy techniques. Some of the most common light modalities for biological imaging are:

Single photon: Fluorescent Lifetime Imaging (FLIM), Foerster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), Pulsed Interleaved Excitation (PIE), Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS), Single Molecule Detection (SMD), etc.
Multi-photon: two-photon (2p), three-photon (3p), Second-Harmonic Generation (SHG), Coherent Anti-Stokes Scattering (CARS), Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), and other non-linear techniques.