Real-time hyperspectral endoscope for early cancer diagnostics

Hyperspectral imaging has tremendous potential to detect important molecular biomarkers of early cancer based on their unique spectral signatures. Several drawbacks have limited their use for in vivo screening applications: most notably their poor temporal and spatial resolution, high expense, and low optical throughput. We present the development of a new real-time hyperspectral endoscope (called the IMS Endoscope) based on an image mapping technique which makes it capable of addressing these challenges. The parallel, high throughput nature of this technique enables the device to operate at frame rates of 3-10 fps while collecting a 3D (x, y, λ) datacube of 350 x 350 x 48.