Flexible two-photon lensless endoscope with tapered multicore fibers
Résumé
The lensless endoscope represents the ultimate limit in miniaturization of imaging tools: an image can be transmitted through an optical fiber by numerical or physical inversion of the fiber's pre- measured transmission matrix. We present here a novel fiber-optic component, a "tapered multi-core fiber (MCF)", designed for integration into ultra-miniaturized endoscopes for minimally invasive two-photon point-scanning imaging. This new design addresses the power delivery issue that has faced MCF based lensless endoscopes. We achieve experimentally a factor 6.0 increase in two-photon signal yield while keeping the ability to point-scan by the memory effect. We report two-photon fluorescent imaging of cells and neurons with these improved MCF tapered fibers.