Scanning fiber endoscopy with highly flexible, 1 mm catheterscopes for wide-field, full-color imaging

In modern endoscopy, wide field of view and full color are considered necessary for navigating inside the body, inspecting tissue for disease and guiding interventions such as biopsy or surgery. Current flexible endoscope technologies suffer from reduced resolution when device diameter shrinks. Endoscopic procedures today, using coherent fiber-bundle technology on the scale of 1 mm, are performed with such poor image quality that the clinician's vision meets the criteria for legal blindness. Here, we review a new and versatile scanning fiber-imaging technology and describe its implementation for ultrathin and flexible endoscopy. This scanning fiber endoscope (SPE) or catheterscope enables high-quality, laser-based, video imaging for ultrathin clinical applications, while also providing new options for in vivo biological research of subsurface tissue and high resolution fluorescence imaging. [GRAPHICS] Looking into the imaging head of a 1.2 mm scanning fiber endoscope