High speed, line-scanning, fiber bundle fluorescence confocal endomicroscopy for improved mosaicking

A significant limitation of fiber bundle endomicroscopy systems is that the field of view tends to be small, usually only several hundred micrometers in diameter. Image mosaicking techniques can increase the effective image size, but require careful manipulation of the probe to ensure sufficient overlap between adjacent frames. For confocal endomicroscopes, which typically have frame rates on the order of 10 fps, this is particularly challenging. In this paper we demonstrate that line-scanning confocal endomicroscopy can, by use of a high speed linear CCD camera, achieve a frame rate of 120 fps while maintaining sufficient resolution and signal-to-noise ratio to allow imaging of topically stained gastrointestinal tissues. This leads to improved performance of a cross-correlation based mosaicking algorithm when compared with lower frame-rate systems.