How can illumination and microscopy work with a single fibre endoscope, just as thin as a particle of ground filter coffee (aeropress/fine pourover grind size)? Using micro-3D-printing, a team of researchers has developed compact fiber-tip optics that co-integrate illumination and imaging in a single fibre bundle endoscope.
Endoscopes usually require separate channels for illumination and bright-field microscopy. For highly miniaturized endoscopes with components in the sub-millimetre regime, the handling and assembly is prohibitively difficult, causing a practical bottleneck for the further miniaturization of endoscopes for biomedical imaging.
This work realizes a micro-3D-printed, monolithic optical system that co-integrates micro-scale imaging and ring-illumination at the tip of an imaging fiber endoscope. Avoiding the difficult manual co-packaging of separate illumination- and imaging channels, this new architecture achieves a compact of just half a millimetre. Additionally, the imaging optics are hermetically sealed, allowing compact imaging with micro-scale resolution both in air and biomedical liquids. Further advances towards practical applicability in biomedical conditions could produce future endoscopes that facilitate the access to small organs and enable less invasive imaging procedures.
