Abstract
Fiber bundle endomicroscopy techniques have been used for numerous minimally invasive imaging applications. However, these techniques may provide limited spatial sampling due to the limited number of imaging cores inside the fiber bundle. Here, we present a custom-fabricated miniature objective that can be coupled to a fiber bundle and can overcome the fiber bundle's sampling threshold by utilizing the spectral encoding concept. The objective has an NA of 0.3 and an outer diameter of 2.4 mm, and can yield a maximum spatial resolution of 2 μm. The objective has been validated against a USAF resolution target and ex vivo tissue samples, and as a result yielded images with higher resolution and more details after the spectral encoding concept was employed.
Highlights
Optical fiber bundles have been used to relay images onto a variety of diagnostic devices due to their unique characteristics
Fiber bundle based imaging systems, suffer from limited sampling. This is due to the fact that, for the fiber bundle to be flexible enough for in vivo imaging applications, there is an inherent compromise to the number of fiber cores and, there is a trade-off between flexibility, sufficient sampling, and field of view (FOV)
The objective has an outer diameter of 2.4 mm and can be integrated with a system that utilizes a fiber bundle for minimally invasive imaging applications
Summary
Optical fiber bundles have been used to relay images onto a variety of diagnostic devices due to their unique characteristics. Kyrish et al shifted the sample and the fiber bundle relative to each other by a distance comparable to a sub-fiber core size at a time This way, the sample was oversampled, which resulted in a lateral resolution improvement [17]. This method, requires actuators at the distal end of the fiber, which can be difficult to miniaturize. The configuration combines a custom-fabricated miniature objective with an optical fiber (FIGH-30-650S, Fujikura Ltd.) and employs the spectral encoding method [25] to exceed the sampling potential of the fiber bundle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first configuration that includes an integrated miniature probe utilizing dispersion to improve the lateral resolution of a fiber bundle based imaging system without requiring any moving components. The proposed configuration can improve the system sampling by a factor of two without the need to change magnification and, can maintain a relatively large FOV
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