Aggregation-induced emission luminogens for assisted cancer surgery

•AIEgens for assisted cancer surgery to reduce the recurrence and improve the prognosis.•Strategy to solve the application problems of AIE probes for surgery navigation.•AIE probes with PDT/PTT function for intraoperative phototherapy.•Molecular regulation and aggregate modulation of AIE probes toward optimal property.•Possible obstacles to the clinical translation of AIE probes. Surgery is still one of the most important means of treating tumors. Fluorescence imaging-mediated surgical navigation and intraoperative phototherapy are considered to be effective ways to improve surgical outcomes. However, the lack of ideal imaging/phototherapy agents continues to be a barrier to their clinical application. Traditional imaging/phototherapy agents present some challenges in living organisms, such as aggregation caused quenching (ACQ), which cause a burst of fluorescent signal or loss of photosensitivity. The introduction of aggregation-induced emission (AIE) luminogens (AIEgens) promises to compensate for the challenges posed by ACQ fluorophores, in addition to their advantages such as high brightness/photostability/photosensitivity in aggregated states, large Stokes shift and excellent biocompatibility. This review focuses on some of the recently emerged AIE probes that are promising to assist the surgery, and systemically summarizes the strategies to solve the issues encountered during the applications of surgery navigation and intraoperative phototherapy. We emphasize the molecular design concept of the AIE probes, reveal their applications in intraoperative imaging and phototherapy, and comment on the existent insufficiency. This review aims to provide concepts for the design of AIE probes for addressing surgical navigation and intraoperative phototherapy, and to present the challenges faced in their clinical translation in order to enhance surgical outcomes in the future.