Spectrally Encoded Confocal Microscopy: A New Paradigm for Diagnosis

Abstract

Since its invention in 1955 by Marvin Minsky, confocal microscopy has become an indispensable tool for biomedical imaging at high resolutions. Dramatic progress in optical fi ber technology has propelled its translation from the benchtop to the bedside in the form of clinical confocal endomicroscopy. The optical sectioning capability, which is central to confocal microscopy, renders this technique as a versatile diagnostic tool that provides images similar to histology and is thus uniquely well-suited for non invasive microscopy in vivo. Refl ectance confocal microscopy (RCM) is a special case of confocal microscopy, which derives structural information of the sample from backscattered light and does not use any external contrast agents. A variant of RCM, known as spectrally encoded confocal microscopy (SECM), obtains images at speeds that are nearly ten times faster than video rate. This technique, described in this review paper, can be used to guide biopsies effi ciently and vastly improve diagnostic yields in clinical scenarios.