This Small Business Innovation Research Program will develop a new endoscopic imaging technology that uses low-cost in-coherent fiber-optic bundles. The success of this technology will have significant impact on the manufacture of medical endoscopes. This technology will bring the following concrete benefits to the field of medical imaging: (a) lowering the cost of endoscopes substantially and thus accelerating the market penetration of endoscopic imaging, (b) increasing the market acceptance of single-use endoscopes which has the benefits of reducing the risk of transmitting infectious disease; and (c) providing a class of new medical endoscopes with improved imaging quality. In Phase 1, our efforts will be to demonstrate the technical feasibility. We will design and construct a laboratory apparatus to show that endoscopic imaging can be obtained through an in-coherent fiber bundle.
The success of this technology will have a fundamental impact on the multi-million dollar annual fiber-optic endoscope market, which is presently dominated at the 93% level by the three Japanese manufacturers, Olympus, Pentax, and Fujinon. Development of this technology will enable the creation of new classes of medical endoscopes that are substantially less expensive to make, safer to the patients, and have improved imaging performance.
