Effect of image fiber on the speckle fringe pattern in image fiber-guided DSPI endoscopy

The effect of using an image fiber on the speckle fringe visibility in an endoscopic DSPI is analyzed here. An endoscope system was designed and developed, using image fiber as the speckle pattern image conduit, to work in the out-of-plane speckle interferometric configuration and experiments were carried out using a curved phantom tissue specimen as the test target. Experimental results obtained using the developed system are compared with that obtained using conventional DSPI system. To obtain a relative and quantitative comparison of the quality of the fringes obtained employing the two methods, an evaluation method that can give a quantified ‘score’ is proposed here.