Abstract

Multimode fibers have potential as a minimally invasive tool for microscopy deep inside biological tissue because they are extremely thin and can carry many independent light channels simultaneously. This means they have the ability to transmit images composed of multiple pixels without requiring distal scanning or lenses, contrarily to single mode fibers. The difficulty is that light propagating through a multimode fiber suffers from modal dispersion and modal mixing. This leads to a scrambling of images as they are propagated through the fiber.

© 2015 IEEE