Quantification and mitigation of system background fluorescence in fiber-optic-based imaging systems

Autofluorescence imaging provides a snapshot of tissue biochemistry that can be used to identify dysplastic tissue. However, deployment in multimodal single-fiber imaging systems is limited by system background fluorescence. We propose to improve the signal-to-background ratio (SBR) through the removal of background emission in fiber-optic catheters for autofluorescence and optical coherence tomography. We collected power and spectral measurements of optical components to characterize their emissions using 450 nm excitation. We measured the per-meter fluorescence contribution of single-mode, double-clad, and multimode optical fibers. By tailoring the detection filter to the emission spectra of the target tissue and system background, we have demonstrated an average of 7.9x improvement in SBR.