Wavefront shaping and imaging through a multimode hollow-core fiber

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of a multimode hollow-core fiber with wavefront shaping to enable high-resolution, minimally-invasive deep-tissue imaging, overcoming limitations of traditional silica fibers such as low NA and background noise.

Contribution

The study introduces a hollow-core fiber approach with tunable high-NA and demonstrates wavefront shaping for improved imaging through multimode fibers.

Findings

Successful wavefront shaping at the fiber output

High-resolution raster-scan imaging achieved

Speckle-based compressive imaging demonstrated

Abstract

Multimode fibers recently emerged as compact minimally-invasive probes for high-resolution deep-tissue imaging. However, the commonly used silica fibers have a relatively low numerical aperture (NA) limiting the spatial resolution of a probe. On top of that, light propagation within the solid core generates auto-fluorescence and Raman background, which interferes with imaging. Here we propose to use a hollow-core fiber to solve these problems. We experimentally demonstrate spatial wavefront shaping at the multimode hollow-core fiber output with tunable high-NA. We demonstrate raster-scan and speckle-based compressive imaging through a multimode hollow-core fiber.