Single fibre endoscope
Traditional endoscopes are based on bundles of many thousands of optical fibres, one fibre for every pixel in the image.
A less intrusive endoscope could be based on a single-fibre the width of a human hair. However, when an image is transmitted along a single-fibre, cross-talk between modes, scrambles the light to make the image unrecognisable.
At QuantIC we are making single fibre endoscopes possible. Using advanced computing, beam shaping, and photon timing allows a 3D image to be extracted from this noise. Such systems would be much less intrusive to imaging inside the human body.
In addition to medical applications, such systems are potentially of relevance to both security and surveillance applications.
These authors contributed equally to this work:
Prof. Miles Padgett - University of Glasgow
Dr Simon Peter Mehkil - University of Glasgow
Dr Daan Stellinga - University of Twente
Prof. David Philips - University of Exeter
Dr Adam Selyem - Fraunhofer Institute, Glasgow
Sergey Turtaev, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology
Prof. Tomas Cizmar, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology