Optical tomography and NIR spectroscopy are potential methods to improve the diagnosis of testicular pathologies. Toevaluate the methods clinically we developed a special measurement device with the capability of spatially resolvedlaser spectroscopy and optical tomography of the testis. Simple spectroscopy is primarily used to obtain global tissueoptical properties of the testis and to find correlations of optical parameters with type and stage of certain pathologies.Optical tomography is applied to visualize spectral contrasts in limited tissue volumes, such as tumors. In the course ofthe study we will determine whether NIR techniques posses the required specifity and sensitivity to give additionalquantitative information about tissue perfusion parameters and to serve for a tumor differentiation.Keywords: Medical and biological imaging, diffuse spectroscopy, optical tomography 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. NIR techniquesNIR spectroscopy and tomography are noninvasive and risk-free diagnostic techniques which until today have beenapplied to different medical fields with varying success. Our investigations aim at an evaluation of these methods forthe improvement of the diagnosis of testicular pathologies. This application field is of some interest, since NIRtechniques may be helpful to differentiate between pathologies with similar or no structural tissue changes byevaluating perfusion parameters or tissue consistency. Furthermore, the outer male reproductive organs are easilyaccessible for optical measurements and should not be exposed to ionizing radiation as in Xray imaging or PET.NIR spectroscopy is a method to obtain local functional tissue parameters such as oxygen saturation and blood volumeand more generally information on the presence of certain tissue chromophores (absorption) and on tissue structure(scattering). Common application fields of NIR spectroscopy are the measurement of blood oxygenation in brain andmuscle [1]-[3]. Thereby, modulation and time-resolved spectroscopy are principle methods to absolutely quantifyabsorption and scattering coefficients of the tissue. In our study, however, we use continuous-wave spatially resolvedspectroscopy [4]-[6] which is able to quantify the total attenuation coefficient =[3