Light-field micro-endoscopy using a fiber bundle: a snapshot 3D epi-fluorescence endoscope
You Zhou, Bo Xiong, Weizhi Song, Xu Zhang, Guoan Zheng, Qionghai Dai, Xun Cao
Abstract
Micro-endoscopes are widely used for detecting and visualizing hard-to-reach areas of the human body and for in vivo observation of animals. A micro-endoscope that can realize 3D imaging at the camera framerate could benefit various clinical and biological applications. In this work, we report the development of a compact light-field micro-endoscope (LFME) that can obtain snapshot 3D fluorescence imaging, by jointly using a single-mode fiber bundle and a small-size light-field configuration. To demonstrate the real imaging performance of our method, we put a resolution chart in different <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="m1"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>z</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> positions and capture the z -stack images successively for reconstruction, achieving 333-μm-diameter field of view, 24 μm optimal depth of field, and up to 3.91 μm spatial resolution near the focal plane. We also test our method on a human skin tissue section and HeLa cells. Our LFME prototype provides epi-fluorescence imaging ability with a relatively small (2-mm-diameter) imaging probe, making it suitable for in vivo detection of brain activity and gastrointestinal diseases of animals.