Wonder what’s the doctor’s device that show him you don’t even know how he reached that point. Well today we will talk about the optical fiber bundle micro endoscopes which serves this purpose to making easier the doctor’s duty of investigating very specific points in the patient’s body.
Optical fiber bundle micro endoscopes are widely used for visualizing hard-to-reach areas of the human body. These ultrathin devices often forgo tunable focusing optics because of size constraints and are therefore limited to two-dimensional (2D) imaging modalities.
They can only reproduce 2D imaging?
Ideally, micro endoscopes would record 3D information for accurate clinical and biological interpretation, without bulky optomechanical parts. Optical fiber bundles commonly used in micro endoscopy are inherently sensitive to depth information.
We use the mode structure within fiber bundle cores to extract the spatio-angular description of captured light rays—the light field—enabling digital refocusing, stereo visualization, and surface and depth mapping of microscopic scenes at the distal fiber tip.
Our work opens a route for minimally invasive clinical micro endoscopy using standard bare fiber bundle probes. Unlike coherent 3D multimode fiber imaging techniques, our incoherent approach is single shot and resilient to fiber bending, making it attractive for clinical adoption.