Low-cost, chromatic confocal endomicroscope for cellular imaging in vivo
Nachiket Kulkarni, Andrew Masciola, Abhinav Nishant, Kyung‐Jo Kim, Heejoo Choi, Arthur F. Gmitro, Esther E. Freeman, Aggrey Semeere, Miriam Nakalembe, Dongkyun Kang
Abstract
We have developed a low-cost, chromatic confocal endomicroscope (CCE) that can image a cross-section of the tissue at cellular resolution. In CCE, a custom miniature objective lens was used to focus different wavelengths into different tissue depths. Therefore, each tissue depth was encoded with the wavelength. A custom miniature spectrometer was used to spectrally-disperse light reflected from the tissue and generate cross-sectional confocal images. The CCE prototype had a diameter of 9.5 mm and a length of 68 mm. Measured resolution was high, 2 µm and 4 µm for lateral and axial directions, respectively. Effective field size was 468 µm. Preliminary results showed that CCE can visualize cellular details from cross-sections of the tissue in vivo down to the tissue depth of 100 µm.