An integrated fibered confocal microscopy system for in vivo and in situ fluorescence imaging -: Applications to endoscopy in small animal imaging

This paper presents a novel fibered confocal fluorescence microscopy system (FCFM) specifically designed for the observation of biological tissues in vivo and in situ, in real time, at the cellular level: the Cell-viZio. The Cell-viZio is made of three main components that are described in this paper: i) FibroScan: an opto-electronic unit controlling a laser scanning, and data acquisition system; ii) ProFlex: a set of flexible miniaturized optical probes allowing in situ imaging. iii) ImageCell: a dedicated software performing real-time control and image processing. The Cell-viZio provides images with typical characteristics (varying with the optical probe) as follows: image lateral resolution: 2.5 microns; axial resolution: 20 microns; field of view: 160 x 120 microns; optical imaging depth: 80 microns (deeper in transparent tissue); data acquisition frame rate: 12 Hz. Thanks to the miniaturization of flexible optical probes (phi : down to 350 mu m), unprecedented accessibility is made possible. In vivo in situ images of rat bladder and mouse colon obtained endoscopically are presented here for the first time.