High-sensitivity hyper-spectral imager for biomedical video diagnostic applications

Video endoscopy allows physicians to visually inspect inner regions of the human body using a camera and only minimal invasive optical instruments. It has become an every-day routine in clinics all over the world. Recently a technological shift was done to increase the resolution from PAL/NTSC to HDTV. But, despite a vast literature on in-vivo and in-vitro experiments with multi-spectral point and imaging instruments that suggest that a wealth of information for diagnostic overlays is available in the visible spectrum, the technological evolution from colour to hyper-spectral video endoscopy is overdue. There were two approaches (NBI, OBI) that tried to increase the contrast for a better visualisation by using more than three wavelengths. But controversial discussions about the real benefit of a contrast enhancement alone, motivated a more comprehensive approach using the entire spectrum and pattern recognition algorithms. Up to now the hyper-spectral equipment was too slow to acquire a multi-spectral image stack at reasonable video rates rendering video endoscopy applications impossible. Recently, the availability of fast and versatile tunable filters with switching times below 50 microseconds made an instrumentation for hyper-spectral video endoscopes feasible. This paper describes a demonstrator for hyper-spectral video endoscopy and the results of clinical measurements using this demonstrator for measurements after otolaryngoscopic investigations and thorax surgeries. The application investigated here is the detection of dysplastic tissue, although hyper-spectral video endoscopy is of course not limited to cancer detection. Other applications are the detection of dysplastic tissue or polyps in the colon or the gastrointestinal tract.