Multimodal confocal hyperspectral imaging microscopy with wavelength sweeping source

Abstract

There exist microscopes that are able to obtain the chemical properties of a sample, because there are some cases in which it is difficult to find out causality of a phenomenon by using only the structural information of a sample. Obtaining the chemical properties of a sample is important in biomedical imaging, because most biological phenomena include changes in the chemical properties of the sample. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is one of the popular imaging methods for characterizing materials and biological samples by measuring the reflectance or emission spectrum of the sample. Because all materials have a unique reflectance spectrum, it is possible to analyze material properties and detect changes in the chemical properties of a sample by measuring the spectral changes with respect to the original spectrum. Because of its ability to measure the spectrum of a sample, HSI is widely used in materials identification applications such as aerial reconnaissance and is the subject of various studies in microscopy. Although there are many advantages to using the method, conventional HSI has some limitations because of its complex configuration and slow speed. In this research we propose a new type of multimodal confocal hyperspectral imaging microscopy with fast image acquisition and a simple configuration that is capable of both confocal and HSI microscopies.