Ultra thin and flexible endoscopy probe for optical coherence tomography based on stepwise transitional core fiber.
We present an ultra thin fiber body endoscopy probe for optical coherence tomography (OCT) which is based on a stepwise transitional core (STC) fiber. In a minimalistic design, our probe was made of spliced specialty fibers that could be directly used for beam probing optics without using a lens. In our probe, the OCT light delivered through a single mode fiber was efficiently expanded to a large mode field of 24 mm diameter for a low beam divergence. The size of our probe was 85 mm in the probe's diameter while operated in a 160 mm thick protective tubing. Through theoretical and experimental analyses, our probe was found to exhibit various attractive features in terms of compactness, flexibility and reliability along with its excellent fabrication simplicity.
Biomedical optics express