Abstract
Endoscopes are used routinely in modern medicine for in-vivo imaging of luminal organs. Technical advances in the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) and optical fields have enabled the further miniaturization of endoscopes, resulting in the ability to image previously inaccessible small-caliber luminal organs, enabling the early detection of lesions and other abnormalities in these tissues. The development of scanning fiber endoscopes supports the fabrication of small cantilever-based imaging devices without compromising the image resolution. The size of an endoscope is highly dependent on the actuation and scanning method used to illuminate the target image area. Different actuation methods used in the design of small-sized cantilever-based endoscopes are reviewed in this paper along with their working principles, advantages and disadvantages, generated scanning patterns, and applications.
Highlights
An endoscope is an imaging device made up of a long and thin tube that can be inserted into the hollow openings of the body to image the inner sections in real time and in a less invasive manner
Advances in fiber optic systems led to the development of flexible endoscopes, enabling high-resolution images of narrow sections of the body and reducing the number of biopsies required for a specific diagnosis, with applications such as cancer detection, microvascular oxygen tension measurement, chronic mesenteric ischemia, subcellular molecular interactions, etc
The advancement in optics along with the development of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and microfabrication techniques led to the fabrication of sub-millimetersized flexible endoscopes that can image the narrow cavities in the body, providing information about early-stage pre-cancerous tissues
Summary
An endoscope is an imaging device made up of a long and thin tube that can be inserted into the hollow openings of the body to image the inner sections in real time and in a less invasive manner. The advancement in optics along with the development of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and microfabrication techniques led to the fabrication of sub-millimetersized flexible endoscopes that can image the narrow cavities in the body, providing information about early-stage pre-cancerous tissues. A large number of cantilever-based imaging devices have been fabricated, which will be discussed later in the paper In such devices, the tip displacement of an optical fiber acting as a cantilever beam dictates the field of view (FOV) and the resolution of the obtained image. The mathematical models and applications of MEMS actuators in fiber optic cantilever-based scanners are reported to provide information about the underlying working physics of these devices and can provide a foundation for the development of miniaturized and more efficient MEMS scanners. A discussion and conclusions about available cantilever-based scanning devices are reported in Sections 5 and 6, respectively
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