肿瘤的早期和迅速诊断对于临床治疗或管理至关重要。与传统方法相比，生物成像具有在早期阶段准确定位和诊断肿瘤的潜力。荧光探针已经成为一种理想的工具，可以可视化肿瘤部位，并检测生物分子，为体内结构和复杂生物化学过程的非侵入性、实时、精确和特异性可视化提供要求。近年来，合成有机化学和新材料的发展促进了近红外小分子感应平台和纳米成像平台的发展。这为生物成像的各种领域（如生物结构和功能成像、疾病诊断、体内原位、实时动态成像等）提供了竞争工具。本篇综述系统地关注了过去3-5年中小分子近红外荧光探针和纳米荧光探针作为新的生物医学成像工具取得的最新进展，并涵盖了肿瘤生物标志物感应、肿瘤微环境成像、肿瘤血管成像、术中指导和作为诊断集成平台的应用，旨在为研究人员设计和开发未来的生物医学诊断工具提供指导。© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Early and rapid diagnosis of tumors is essential for clinical treatment or management. In contrast to conventional means, bioimaging has the potential to accurately locate and diagnose tumors at an early stage. Fluorescent probe has been developed as an ideal tool to visualize tumor sites and to detect biological molecules which provides a requirement for noninvasive, real-time, precise, and specific visualization of structures and complex biochemical processes in vivo. Rencently, the development of synthetic organic chemistry and new materials have facilitated the development of near-infrared small molecular sensing platforms and nanoimaging platforms. This provides a competitive tool for various fields of bioimaging such as biological structure and function imaging, disease diagnosis, in situ at the in vivo level, and real-time dynamic imaging. This review systematically focused on the recent progress of small molecular near-infrared fluorescent probes and nano-fluorescent probes as new biomedical imaging tools in the past 3-5 years, and it covers the application of tumor biomarker sensing, tumor microenvironment imaging, and tumor vascular imaging, intraoperative guidance and as an integrated platform for diagnosis, aiming to provide guidance for researchers to design and develop future biomedical diagnostic tools.© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.