Fiber Optics in Medicine

Abstract

The goal of this article is to give the reader basic tools necessary to understand principles of biomedical fiber optics and its applications. In addition to diagnostic, imaging, and therapeutic applications that are described in this article, optical fibers have been employed in a number of biomedical applications, for example, laser surgery and fiber‐based transducers for monitoring physiologically important parameters (temperature, pressure, oxygen saturation, blood flow). All those subjects have been covered in detail in the dedicated articles of this encyclopedia. The structure of this article is the following. The first section provides general physical and engineering principles of fiber optics needed to understand the rest of the article. It discusses the physics of total internal reflection and throughput, fiber propagation modes, optical fiber construction, and types of fibers. The next section provides the reader with the review of illumination applications of fibers in medicine. The third section discusses the diagnostic applications of the biomedical fibers, including imaging and spectroscopy. The last section reviews therapeutic applications of fibers.