2022/12/21 by Ningzhi Xie, Xie, Ningzhi, Matthew D. Carson +9
Engineering · #Optical Coherence Tomography Applications #Electrowetting and Microfluidic Technologies #Advanced optical system design
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.11272
The scanning fiber endoscope (SFE), an ultra-small optical imaging device with a large field-of-view (FOV) for having a clear forward view into the interior of blood vessels, has great potential in the cardio-vascular disease diagnosis and surgery assistance, which is one of the key applications for short-wave infrared (SWIR) biomedical imaging. The state-of-the-art SFE system uses a miniaturized refractive spherical lens doublet for beam projection. A meta-lens is a promising alternative which can be made much thinner and has fewer off-axis aberrations than its refractive counterpart. We report an SFE system with meta-lens working at 1310nm to achieve a resolution (∼ 140μm at the center of field and the imaging distance of 15mm), FOV (∼ 70 ∘), and depth-of-focus (DOF ∼ 15mm), which are comparable to a state-of-the-art refractive lens SFE. The use of the meta-lens reduces the length of the optical track from 1.2mm to 0.86mm. The resolution of our meta-lens based SFE drops by less than a factor of 2 at the edge of the FOV, while the refractive lens counterpart has a ∼ 3 times resolution degradation. These results show the promise of integrating a meta-lens into an endoscope for device minimization and optical performance improvement.