Abstract: Surgery serves as a primary approach to curing major diseases and holds significant value in clinical treatment. However, traditional surgical methods mainly rely on the visual observation and experiential judgment of surgeons, which can easily lead to inaccuracies in identifying lesion boundaries and during excision, potentially resulting in postoperative complications. Therefore, the development of surgical navigation tools with high sensitivity and specificity has become a critical issue urgently needing resolution in modern medicine. Owing to its advantages such as non-invasiveness, high sensitivity, ease of operation, and the ability to detect biological analytes in real time at the molecular level, fluorescence imaging technology has emerged as a powerful tool for surgical navigation. Fluorescent probes, as the molecular foundation of fluorescence imaging, have garnered considerable attention from researchers. Although a variety of fluorescent probes with diverse structures have been developed, most reported probes still suffer from drawbacks such as fluorescence quenching in the aggregated state, poor photostability, and relatively short emission wavelengths. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) probes, with their outstanding characteristics including bright emission in the aggregated state, excellent photostability, and widely tunable emission wavelengths, are becoming a new research focus in this field. This article systematically reviews recent advances in AIE probes for surgical navigation, with a focus on their molecular design strategies and specific application cases. Based on their emission wavelengths, AIE probes are categorized into two groups: visible light/NIR-I and NIR-II. Finally, the future development trends and application prospects of AIE probes in the field of surgical navigation are discussed.

Key words: Aggregation-induced emission, Surgical navigation, Fluorescent probe