Endoscopic subsurface imaging in tissues

The objective of this work is to develop endoscopic subsurface optical imaging technology that will be able to image different tissue components located underneath the surface of the tissue at an imaging depth of up to 1 centimeter. This effort is based on the utilization of existing technology and components developed for medical endoscopes with the incorporation of the appropriate modifications to implement the spectral and polarization difference imaging technique. This subsurface imaging technique employs polarization and spectral light discrimination in combination with image processing to remove a large portion of the image information from the outer layers of the tissue which leads to enhancement of the contrast and image quality of subsurface tissue structures.