FlimFit should be able to deal with the B&H data. Haven't tried personally.

http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/partner/flimfit/flimfit-supported-file-formats

But I'm sure B&H provide their own standard software...

Thanks Zdenek! B&H does provide its own software but the software is used for FLIM and exceeds my needs. On top of that, it is expensive too. For my purposes, i need a software which is able to deconvolute decay profiles from the IRFs and give me the lifetime data. I am not doing any imaging experiments at all.

Ah so, the the FlimFit is an overkill as well, I'm afraid. You may be able to find some matlab code snippets to help you. Also B&H could provide you with some test license to try the software. If you don't need SPCImage, maybe Burst Analyser (also from B&H)  could work for you.

You may want to check out the Globals software package from the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics (http://www.lfd.uci.edu/globals/).  I am pretty sure that it can handle B&H format.  You can get a free trial software I believe.  You will need the Globals for Spectrsocopy package.

I used the FluoFit from Picoquant, but although this one can read the B&H files, it gave me a wrong x-axis. If I'm not mistaken, the software treated channel numbers as ps or so.

The FAST software from Edinburgh Photonics, however, did the job pretty well, although it loaded 64 files, of which only the first one contained data and the 63 others were empty. By removing them, fitting was no problem. Another major drawback of this software package is that you cannot (or not to my knowledge) save the fits. That is, you cannot check how you fitted your data by re-opening some file.

Would something like Origin/OriginPro or IgorPro be suitable for you? Both are robust data analysis software/graphing packages that I know are used widely for not only the fitting you need here but for many other forms of data. I'm not sure if the BH SimpleTau-130 file format would load directly (if it's a proprietary binary format) or if it can be saved instead as an ASCII file that would easily be importable into Origin or Igor.

Cost wise you can get both for academic prices, and Origin now offers a student version as well. I prefer it to Igor overall, but I'm also a Windows user and Igor is better cross-platform with a native OS X version.

I'd also say you could probably find Matlab code that could be run with Octave (free). There also is likely Python script/code that you could find. In both cases you'd have to be able to deal with the BHT-130 file format again if it's proprietary.

Thanks everyone! I can export data from B&H system in an ASCII format. I would like to try origin but wouldn't I need some sort of coding knowledge to make a function which can do the de-convolution process. As I am not really proficient with MATLAB or  Origin, I was thinking about getting a commercial software package. 

With Matlab then you're more apt to have to do some coding, but as others suggested you could search for code snippets or stuff on the 'webs or at MathWorks forums. Depending on your university's package of Matlab, the available functions to use for fitting could be limited. The student version is limited in dataset size as well, so don't know if that would be a concern.

Origin wouldn't necessarily require you to code something up to do the fitting. Check out their website for a list of built-in fitting functions. These would be accessible to use for any dataset you're working with. If your needs are significantly more specialized then you can get into coding with OriginC or LabTalk with the ability to access any internal functions.

Fluortools.com provides free software for fluorescence decay analysis. I have not tried the newest version however. You can download it here: http://www.fluortools.com/software/decayfit

You can have a look at the following papers:

- FERNICOLA V. C., ROSSO L., GALLEANO R., SUN T., ZHANG Z. Y., GRATTAN K. T. V., “Investigations on Exponential Lifetime Measurements for Fluorescence Thermometry”, Review of Scientific Instruments, Vol. 71, No. 7, pp. 2938-2943 (2000).

- ROSSO L., FERNICOLA V., “Time-and-Frequency-domain Analyses of Fluorescence Lifetime for Temperature Sensing”, Review of Scientific Instruments, Vol. 77, No. 034901 (2006);

where a comparison was made on different fluorescent lifetime estimation approaches and the associated accuracy.

In our lab we develop fluorescence analysis tools and software and make it available free to use for the community. It has been tested under Win 2000 to Win Vista 32bit. Code core is basically same a Globals package in its most standard use.  Files are accepted in variety of ascii formats. Please, feel free to contact Jay Knutson, NIH/NHLBI ([email protected])  with request to download and use.