Digital confocal microscopy through a multimode fiber

Abstract

Acquiring high-contrast optical images deep inside biological tissues is still a challenging problem. Confocal microscopy is an important tool for biomedical imaging since it improves image quality by rejecting background signals. However, it suffers from low sensitivity in deep tissues due to light scattering. Recently, multimode fibers have provided a new paradigm for minimally invasive endoscopic imaging by controlling light propagation through them. Here we introduce a combined imaging technique where confocal images are acquired through a multimode fiber. We achieve this by digitally engineering the excitation wavefront and then applying a virtual digital pinhole on the collected signal. In this way, we are able to acquire images through the fiber with significantly increased contrast. With a fiber of numerical aperture 0.22, we achieve a lateral resolution of 1.5um, and an axial resolution of 12.7um. The point-scanning rate is currently limited by our spatial light modulator (20Hz).