The Development of Double Clad Fiber and Double Clad Fiber Coupler for Fiber Based Biomedical Imaging Systems

We report the fabrication of double clad fiber (DCF) and DCF coupler, suitable for fiber based imaging systems requiring the dual-channel transmission. Unlike the conventional DCF which uses silica, for both cladding layers, the proposed DCF uses a low-index polymer for its outer-cladding layer coated over the conventional silica inner-cladding layer. The DCF is drawn with a conventional SMF preform but a low-index polymer coating is used for both jacket and outer-cladding of the fiber. To achieve the cladding mode coupling, a DCF coupler is fabricated by simply twisting two pieces of the proposed DCF after removing the polymer-coating at contacting regions. A cladding mode coupling ratio of 30% was achieved with a contact length of 16 cm. The proposed DCF and DCF coupler were employed in a composite optical coherence tomography (OCT) and fluorescence spectroscopy (FS) system, and both OCT images and FS signal from a plant tissue are measured simultaneously.