Low-Cost, Chromatic Confocal Endomicroscope For Cellular Imaging In Vivo

We have developed a low-cost, chromatic confocal endomicroscope (CCE) that can image a cross-section of the tissue at cellular resolution. In CCE, a custom miniature objective lens was used to focus different wavelengths into different tissue depths. Therefore, each tissue depth was encoded with the wavelength. A custom miniature spectrometer was used to spectrally-disperse light reflected from the tissue and generate cross-sectional confocal images. The CCE prototype had a diameter of 9.5 mm and a length of 68 mm. Measured resolution was high, 2 mu m and 4 mu m for lateral and axial directions, respectively. Effective field size was 468 mu m. Preliminary results showed that CCE can visualize cellular details from cross-sections of the tissue in vivo down to the tissue depth of 100 mu m.