This work demonstrates a new photosensitive glassy material in the form of poly-di-methyl-siloxane (PDMS) loaded with novel Ge-derivatives. A femtosecond laser is used to write directly into the bulk of pristine and Ge-modified PDMS. Raman spectroscopy is used to study the origin of the stable refractive index (RI) change induced by fs laser exposure. Multimode waveguides, as well as a highly tunable diffraction gratings, were written into the bulk of the new material, Ge-PDMS, in order to demonstrate the inclusion of photonics structures embedded inside. Novel photonics functionality may now be incorporated into PDMS, which is a material widely used in the optics industry and for lab-on-chip application (LOC).

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Intra-arterial catheter guidance is instrumental to the success of minimally invasive procedures, such as percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. However, traditional device tracking methods, such as electromagnetic or infrared sensors, exhibits drawbacks such as magnetic interference or line of sight requirements. In this work, shape sensing of bends of different curvatures and lengths is demonstrated both asynchronously and in real-time using optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) with a polymer extruded optical fiber triplet with enhanced backscattering properties. Simulations on digital phantoms showed that reconstruction accuracy is of the order of the interrogator’s spatial resolution (millimeters) with sensing lengths of less than 1 m and a high SNR.

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