Abstract
High quality imaging through sub-millimeter endoscopic probes provides clinicians with valuable diagnostics capabilities in hard to reach locations within the body. Spectrally encoded endoscopy (SEE) has been shown promising for such task; however, challenging probe fabrication and high speckle noise had prevented its testing in in vivo studies. Here we demonstrate a novel miniature SEE probe which incorporates some of the recent progress in spectrally encoded technology into a compact and robust endoscopic system. A high-quality miniature diffraction grating was fabricated using automated femtosecond laser cutting from a large bulk grating. Using one spectrally encoded channel for imaging and a separate channel for incoherent illumination, the new system has large depth of field, negligible back reflections and well controlled speckle noise which depends on the core diameter of the illumination fiber. Moreover, by using a larger imaging channel, higher groove density grating, shorter wavelength and broader spectrum, the new endoscopic system now allow significant improvements in almost all imaging parameter compared to previous systems, through an ultra-miniature endoscopic probe.