A single multimode fiber has been considered an ideal optical element for endoscopic imaging due to the possibility of the direct image transmission via multiple spatial modes. However, the wave distortion induced by the mode dispersion has been a fundamental limitation. In this Letter, we proposed a method for eliminating the effect of the mode dispersion and therefore realized wide-field endoscopic imaging by using only a single multimode fiber with no scanner attached to the fiber. Our method will potentially revolutionize endoscopy in various fields encompassing medicine and industry.

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Thick biological tissues give rise to not only the multiple scattering of incoming light waves, but also the aberrations of remaining signal waves. The challenge for existing optical microscopy methods to overcome both problems simultaneously has limited sub-micron spatial resolution imaging to shallow depths. Here we present an optical coherence imaging method that can identify aberrations of waves incident to and reflected from the samples separately, and eliminate such aberrations even in the presence of multiple light scattering. The proposed method records the time-gated complex-field maps of backscattered waves over various illumination channels, and performs a closed-loop optimization of signal waves for both forward and phase-conjugation processes. We demonstrated the enhancement of the Strehl ratio by more than 500 times, an order of magnitude or more improvement over conventional adaptive optics, and achieved a spatial resolution of 600 nm up to an imaging depth of seven scattering mean free paths.

A conventional lens has well-defined transfer function with which we can form an image of a target object. On the contrary, scattering media such as biological tissues, multimode optical fibers and layers of disordered nanoparticles have highly complex transfer function, which makes them impractical for the general imaging purpose. In recent studies, we presented a method of experimentally recording the transmission matrix of such media, which is a measure of the transfer function. In this review paper, we introduce two major applications of the transmission matrix: enhancing light energy delivery and imaging through scattering media. For the former, we identified the eigenchannels of the transmission matrix with large eigenvalues and then coupled light to those channels in order to enhance light energy delivery through the media. For the latter, we solved matrix inversion problem to reconstruct an object image from the distorted image by the scattering media. We showed the enlargement of the numerical aperture of imaging systems with the use of scattering media and demonstrated endoscopic imaging through a single multimode optical fiber working in both reflectance and fluorescence modes. Our approach will pave the way of using scattering media as unique optical elements for various biophotonics applications.