Flexible Scanning Fiber Endoscope for Medical Imaging and Diagnostics
Eric Seibel, Ph.D., of the Human Photonics Lab at the University of Washington demonstrates his scanning fiber endoscope (SFE). The size of a piece of spaghetti, this flexible endoscope provides microscopic images of narrow, previously inaccessible spaces in the body. Imaging, diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring can be performed from the SFE with the goal of early detection and less-invasive treatment of cancers within the body. The SFE technology features high-resolution imaging within an ultra-thin size of less than 2 mm in diameter, and integrated optical diagnoses and laser therapies with full-color imaging.
Transcript
00:00:07 Hello, my name is Eric Seibel, professor at the University of Washington, and this is a scanning fiber, highly flexible one millimeter endoscope. This endoscope has a rigid tip, just about nine milimeters, highly flexible three meter long tether, and this is unlike any other flexible endoscope. Instead of having a camera chip behind the lenses at the tip with diffuse illumination, this is different. It has one illumination optical fiber or spot of light that is then scanned in a circular pattern and that circular pattern is grown up to 300 spirals or 600 lines and then it collapses back and does that thirty times a second with red, green, and blue light, and red, green, and blue light forms white light and the white light then picks up the color in my hand or reflections and it transmits that back through just a few tens of optical fibers in the periphery of this ultra-thin
00:01:33 endoscope, and in that case, images are formed one pixel at a time at megahertz rates as this illumination fiber is scanned by a piezoelectric actuator at about 12 kilohertz, 12,000 times per second. So it's scanned around 12,000 times per second and forms thirty frames per second. Now, these images are very high resolution for such a small size. You can get to small places inside the body. Deep inside the body we've imaged the bile ducts which the scope would have to go down through the esophagus into the stomach and then up into the ducts underneath the liver and that was successful in humans. It's been used in human esophageal imaging for screening for early signs of cancer. It's approved for the bladder and fallopian tubes. But the exciting thing about using a laser light is that the laser light can be used to excite fluorescence. So the fluorescence can be used for early detection of cancer
00:02:50 using biomarkers. And you can use multiple biomarkers for the three lasers. We have red, green, and blue lasers here. And those three lasers excite the fluorescence. It�s very low powered light here, and you can see the fluorescence with the regular white light imaging. In addition to that, we can use the laser to guide the biopsy. So if this was a point here and you wanted to reach out and grab that, we could put this imager right on the inside of the forceps so you could image right there and then grab, so the eye could be on the tip of the tool. The eye could be on the tip of the scalpel to cut for the surgery. It could be on the tip of a robot arm so that it could precisely go and acquire let's say tumor cells from the brain. Another thing is, the laser could be increased in power and this bright spot could be used, and it could actually give a sun tan on the inside
00:04:04 of the human body which could actually kill that first layer of cancer cells and that would be laser therapies. All these techniques. To give an image in my teeth and my tongue. It shows the image quality on this very low-cost monitor here.