Biophotonics in veterinary medicine: current clinical applications, translational challenges, and emerging opportunities.

Biophotonics, a relatively new scientific field, applies optical or light-based techniques to biology and medicine. These approaches enable non-invasive visualization, monitoring, and characterization of biological tissues and processes, thereby supporting diagnostics, treatments, monitoring, imaging, and surgery. Biophotonic capabilities could be particularly valuable in veterinary medicine, where patients cannot verbally describe symptoms and where rapid, non-invasive assessment may reduce reliance on invasive sampling and, in selected cases, sedation or anesthesia. This perspective review examines the emerging application of biophotonics in veterinary medicine, including optical coherence tomography (OCT), fluorescence-guided imaging, hyperspectral and multispectral imaging, Raman spectroscopy, visible and near-infrared spectroscopy, and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. Among currently available biophotonic approaches, OCT and fluorescence-guided imaging have achieved the highest level of clinical translation in veterinary medicine, particularly in ophthalmology (retinal layering assessment) and surgical oncology (real-time intraoperative tumor margin delineation). In contrast, hyperspectral imaging and Raman spectroscopy remain largely confined to research and early translational settings despite promising diagnostic performance. Across modalities, major barriers to wider clinical adoption include high equipment costs, lack of standardized protocols, and limited multicenter validation. Finally, animal patients vary considerably in haircoat, pigmentation, and skin thickness, which can affect light penetration and optical signal quality. Nevertheless, multimodal and AI-assisted approaches show strong potential to improve non-invasive diagnostics, intraoperative guidance, and physiologic monitoring in veterinary medicine.