Browsing by Author "Shadfan, Adam Harbi"

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    Multimodal Foveated Endomicroscope for the Early Detection of Oral and Esophageal Cancer
    (2016-04-11) Shadfan, Adam Harbi; Tkaczyk, Tomasz S
    Digestive tract cancers will be responsible for nearly 30% of all cancer deaths in the United States in 2016. Oral and esophageal cancers alone will result in over 25,000 deaths, with an estimated 65,000 new cases. Most of these deaths can be attributed to the late detection of cancers, when treatment options become more limited. This late detection is often due to the limitations of current standard screening procedures, which often struggle with rapid and reliable recognition of precancerous warning signs. Optical imaging methods have the potential to become powerful, non-invasive early diagnostic tools. However, most systems are often limited by several factors including insufficient optical resolution, limited field of view, or a lack diagnostically relevant data, leading to devices with either low specificity or low sensitivity. This work presents the design and development of several technologies with the goal of creating a multimodal endomicroscope that overcomes the limits of current diagnostic techniques for the early detection of oral and esophageal cancer with high sensitivity and specificity. The first stage in the development of the endomicroscope is the design, fabrication and validation of a miniature foveated objective, which provides both widefield and high resolution imaging in a compact form. The objective accomplishes this task by introducing distortion into the optical system in order to nominally mimic the variable resolution regions in the fovea of the human eye. Two image relay techniques were developed to integrate the objective with (1) a snapshot image spectrometer with the ability to capture spatial and spectral data simultaneously in order to rapidly locate suspicious areas of interest and (2) a custom confocal microscope capable of high resolution imaging to observe morphological changes in the tissue. The performance of the integrated device was evaluated through the imaging of mouse and human cancer samples.