Tube-leaky fiber bundle for infrared thermal image transmission

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K14241
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Electron device/Electronic equipment
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: Matsuura Yuji 東北大学, 医工学研究科, 教授 (10241530)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 木野 彩子 東北大学, 医工学研究科, 学術研究員 (30536082)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 中空光ファイバ / フォトニック結晶ファイバ / 赤外サーモグラフィー

Outline of Final Research Achievements

A tube-leaky fiber bundle that is fabricated by a glass drawing technique is proposed for endoscopic, infrared thermal image transmission. A fiber bundle that has 245 cores and each pixel sizes are less than 80 um was fabricated. By setting the thickness of glass wall to a quarter-wavelength optical thickness, light is confined in the air core as a leaky mode with a low loss owing to the interference effect of the thin glass wall. From measurement of the transmission losses, it was found that bundled tube-leaky fibers have reasonably low transmission losses in spite of the small pixel size. Considering applications with rigid endoscopes, an imaging system composed of a 30-cm long fiber bundle and a half-ball lens with a diameter of 2 mm that can be inserted into an endoscope was fabricated. By using this imaging system, it was shown that the minimum detected temperature was 32.0 ℃ and the temperature resolution of the system was around 0.7 ℃ in the body temperature range.

Free Research Field

医用光工学