New concept for the development of a confocal endomicroscope

It is one of modern medicine's top priorities to reduce the stress for the patient during diagnosis and therapy by designing minimally invasive applications of medical techniques. Microsystems technology has always held the key to minimally invasive solutions in surgery and micro-endoscopy. The new measuring system KOMED is currently developed for the application of in-vivo cellular microscopy. This approach is based on the concept of a miniaturised fibre-optical confocal microscope. The application range of this microsensor system includes the minimally invasive optical biopsy for purposes such as the early detection of tumour cells. In this paper the concept of the KOMED system is described, as well as technical challenges to be solved in the project.