Large FOV short-wave infrared meta-lens for scanning fiber endoscopy

TL;DR

This paper presents a meta-lens based scanning fiber endoscope operating at 1310nm, achieving comparable imaging performance to traditional refractive lenses but with a significantly reduced optical length, enhancing device miniaturization.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a meta-lens design for SFE that reduces size and maintains high resolution and FOV, outperforming traditional refractive lenses in off-axis resolution degradation.

Findings

Meta-lens reduces optical length from 1.2mm to 0.86mm.

Resolution drops less than a factor of 2 at FOV edges with meta-lens.

Meta-lens based SFE achieves 70° FOV and 15mm depth-of-focus.

Abstract

The scanning fiber endoscope (SFE), an ultra-small optical imaging device with a large field-of-view (FOV) for having a clear forward view into the interior of blood vessels, has great potential in the cardio-vascular disease diagnosis and surgery assistance, which is one of the key applications for short-wave infrared (SWIR) biomedical imaging. The state-of-the-art SFE system uses a miniaturized refractive spherical lens doublet for beam projection. A meta-lens is a promising alternative which can be made much thinner and has fewer off-axis aberrations than its refractive counterpart. We report an SFE system with meta-lens working at 1310nm to achieve a resolution ($\sim 140\mu m$ at the center of field and the imaging distance of $15mm$), FOV ($\sim 70 \circ$), and depth-of-focus (DOF $\sim 15mm$), which are comparable to a state-of-the-art refractive lens SFE. The use of the meta-lens reduces the length of the optical track from $1.2mm$ to $0.86mm$. The resolution of our meta-lens based SFE drops by less than a factor of $2$ at the edge of the FOV, while the refractive lens counterpart has a $\sim 3$ times resolution degradation. These results show the promise of integrating a meta-lens into an endoscope for device minimization and optical performance improvement.