Fiber optic tunable probe for endoscopic optical coherence tomography

Abstract

A novel miniaturized fiber optic tunable endoscopic probe based on a pneumatically actuated micro-lens is presented. The probe has a diameter of ∼4 mm and is integrated into a time-domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) system. The integration of the tunable lens with the OCT system leads to a uniformly high lateral resolution and high contrast of the OCT images over the entire scan depth. In addition, the tunable probe can be considered as a platform for integrating multiple microsystems, including particularly scanning micro-mirrors, in a single high-performance endoscopic OCT system.