Hello, my name is Eric Seibel, professor at the University of Washington, and this is
a scanning fiber, highly flexible one millimeter endoscope. This endoscope has a rigid tip,
just about nine milimeters, highly flexible three meter long tether, and this is unlike any
other flexible endoscope. Instead of having a camera chip behind the lenses at the tip
with diffuse illumination, this is different. It has one illumination optical fiber or spot
of light that is then scanned in a circular pattern and that circular pattern is grown
up to 300 spirals or 600 lines and then it collapses back and does that thirty times
a second with red, green, and blue light, and red, green, and blue light forms white
light and the white light then picks up the color in my hand or reflections and it transmits
that back through just a few tens of optical fibers in the periphery of this ultra-thin
endoscope, and in that case, images are formed one pixel at a time at megahertz rates as
this illumination fiber is scanned by a piezoelectric actuator at about 12 kilohertz, 12,000 times per
second. So it's scanned around 12,000 times per second and forms thirty frames per second.
Now, these images are very high resolution for such a small size. You can get to small
places inside the body. Deep inside the body we've imaged the bile ducts which the scope
would have to go down through the esophagus into the stomach and then up into the ducts
underneath the liver and that was successful in humans. It's been used in human esophageal
imaging for screening for early signs of cancer. It's approved for the bladder and fallopian
tubes. But the exciting thing about using a laser light is that the laser light can be
used to excite fluorescence. So the fluorescence can be used for early detection of cancer
using biomarkers. And you can use multiple biomarkers for the three lasers. We have red,
green, and blue lasers here. And those three lasers excite the fluorescence. It�s very
low powered light here, and you can see the fluorescence with the regular white light imaging.
In addition to that, we can use the laser to guide the biopsy. So if this was a point
here and you wanted to reach out and grab that, we could put this imager right on the
inside of the forceps so you could image right there and then grab, so the eye could be on
the tip of the tool. The eye could be on the tip of the scalpel to cut for the surgery.
It could be on the tip of a robot arm so that it could precisely go and acquire let's
say tumor cells from the brain. Another thing is, the laser could be increased in power
and this bright spot could be used, and it could actually give a sun tan on the inside
of the human body which could actually kill that first layer of cancer cells and that
would be laser therapies. All these techniques. To give an image in my teeth and my tongue.
It shows the image quality on this very low-cost monitor here.