Flexible hollow polycarbonate fiber for endoscopic infrared laser treatment

For endoscopic application, inexpensive, safe, and extremely flexible hollow infrared optical fibers have been fabricated based on the polycarbonate (PC) capillary with silver and cyclic olefin polymer (COP) as inner coatings. By optimizing the drawing condition of PC capillary from a commercially available polycarbonate tube and inner-coating process, transmission efficiency of hollow PC fibers is shown to be equal to those of glass capillary based ones. Both Er:YAG laser light and green pilot beam were delivered through the endoscope with low losses even when it was sharply bent with a bending radius as small as 1 centimeter. Preliminary experiments were also conducted on possibility of transmitting infrared thermal image by using bundled silver-coated PC hollow fibers.