Development of multimodal micro-endoscopic system with oblique illumination for simultaneous fluorescence imaging and spectroscopy of oral cancer

Multimodality of an optical system implies the use of one or more optical techniques to improve the system's overall performance and maximum utility. In this article, we demonstrate a multimodal system with oblique illumination that combines two different techniques; fluorescence micro-endoscopy and spectroscopy simultaneously and can be utilized to obtain diverse information from the same location of biological sample. In present system, use of graded index (GRIN) rod-lens makes it highly compact and oblique incidence decouples illumination geometry with collection geometry, preventing CCD cameras from saturation and reduces number of optical elements, thereby making system further miniaturized and field-portable. It also overcomes the disadvantages of undesired reflections from different optical elements. The experimental results of simultaneous imaging and spectroscopy of the biological samples are presented along with quantitative spectroscopic parameters; peak wavelength shift, area under the curve and full width half maximum (FWHM). The spatial resolution, spectral resolution and field of view of the system are found to be 4.38 mu m, 0.5 nm and 2.071x1.548mm2, respectively. Furthermore, we have obtained the red shift for cancerous oral tissue with respect to normal oral tissue 5.79 +/- 1.071 nm. This could be important indicator for oral cancer screening.

Automated summary

This article demonstrates a multimodal optical system that combines fluorescence micro-endoscopy and spectroscopy with oblique illumination. The system utilizes a graded index rod-lens for compactness and portability, and overcomes the issue of undesired reflections. Experimental results show that the system has high spatial and spectral resolution.