The new discovery will allow better use of fiber optics for imaging cells in the body

Brno, 11 August 2015

Although optical fiber is currently widely used in communication technology and medicine, their potential is not fully utilized. Research Team Scotland's University of Dundee, which was joined also by Professor Tomas Tyc from the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University (MU), now revealed new uses for fiber optics in medicine and biology, for example, a closer study of the processes taking place in the brain and development of Alzheimer's disease.

Optical fiber propagates the information in the form of particles of light or photons. Photons within the fiber reflect in complicated manner, and thus often partially loose information that they carry. Therefore, for example in an endoscope which is used in medicine to observe body cavities, you must use a bundle of many tens of thousands of optical fibers, each of which transmits only one pixel of the image.

However, there are fibers that transmit more information at once. "Until now, experts thought that the process of light propagation in these types of optical fiber can not predict their capacity and therefore can not be fully exploited. But we checked in current commercial fibers, it is possible to predict it with high accuracy, even when the fiber is bent or otherwise deformed, "said Tyc, who works at the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of Faculty of Science.

Significant discovery, published by the prestigious journal Nature Photonics, will allow better use of the potential of optical fibers. "It could pave the way for a new type of endoscope with thickness of a human hair, which would allow, for example, the observation of individual neurons in the brain," said Tyc. Instead of tens of thousands bundle of fibers will thus be put to use only a single thread, which will allow to investigate much smaller objects in the human body than is now possible without significant damage to the surrounding tissues.

Earlier, the experts found that for each thread can be so-called transformation matrix measured. That expresses how to change the state of light when passing through the fiber, and which will be the final image or information to reconstruct the original form. The problem was that the transformation matrix changes as the fibers are changed, and it was necessary to repeatedly measure it for each bending. "But we have shown that the transformation matrix can be calculated only from the fact that we know the new shape of the fiber, which is measured much more easily than the matrix itself. This will allow real-time viewing of objects, although the shape of the fiber is constantly changing, "said Tyc.

Research was led by Thomas Čižmář from the University of Dundee, co-working also with Martin Plöschner, who works at Macquarie University in Sydney. All three co-authors are graduates of Masaryk University.

Original paper is here.

Tereza Fojtová, tel: 549 49 49 49, mobil: 724517335, e-mail: fojtova@muni.cz

Optical fibres - illustrative picture.