High Resolution Endoscopes As Thin As Human Hair?

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:11am
John Hewitt


Current endoscopes typically employ either a bundle of optical fibers, or a single fiber outfitted with a scanning head. The Stanford device, which has just a single MMF, can be much more compact — at two tenths of a micron, it is just thicker than a human hair. Previous MMFs, which conduct light via many different fiber paths, or modes,  were unable to resolve more features in their field of view than the number of  modes they possessed. This was due to the scrambling of the light along the way. By structuring the illumination with the SLM in a such a way that the modes could be unscrambled, so to speak, the number of resolvable features could be increased to four times the number of modes. The technique also borrows from the relatively new field of random sampling, which has also led to dramatic increases in the speed of image recording in MRI scans.

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