Medical endoscopy is now a common but critical healthcare procedure to look inside, and perform medical procedures in the body. When performing endoscopic surgical procedures in the abdominal cavity (known as laparoscopy) only a small insertion cut needs be made into the abdominal wall. This is known as “key-hole” surgery or minimally invasive surgery. Its use has increased hugely over the years and continues to grow rapidly, driven by clinician preference for minimally invasive surgeries together with rising elderly population and prevalence of diseases requiring endoscopic procedures. As the body is dark, endoscopy requires incorporation of a suitably strong light source delivered by fibre optic bundle that must be embedded in the endoscope. To couple sufficient power into the fibre requires high spatial quality or “high-brightness” light. The clinical-standard for laparoscopic illumination to enable surgical viewing in the large body cavity is the xenon arc-light source but its short lifetime (~500hrs) requires regular replacements and although bright its spectrum is static. Direct replacement with LED light technology is not suitable as its high divergence insufficiently couples into the fibre bundle of the endoscope illumination system.

The aim of this project is to provide a new modern ultra-bright light source to enable enhanced medical endoscopic imaging. With dynamic spectral profiling, this light source can improve tissue contrast for superior diagnostic detection leading to improved patient healthcare and be a modern replacement for out-dated lamp technology.

Our ultra-bright alternative light source technology to be developed in this project takes low brightness LED light and enhances the brightness by one or two orders-of-magnitude by using fluorescence-converted light concentrated in light guides whilst generating new spectral wavelengths. By implementing an innovative multi-fluorophore device, a new white-light source will be developed. It will be trialled as a superior endoscopic illumination source to outperform the clinical-standard xenon lamp. To address the need for enhanced medical imaging, this ultra-bright light source will be configured with independent excitation of different fluorophore colours to allow dynamic spectral profiling to enable the surgeon to better visual disease tissues and anomalies with enhanced contrast. Alongside superior imaging, the new white-light source based on low-cost, efficient LED light has ultra-long lifetime (~30,000 hours) about 60 times longer than the xenon lamp (~500hrs) to meet modern environmental energy-efficiency standards and reduction of waste disposal. Beyond medical endoscopy, this ultra-bright light source could open up benefits in many other illumination applications e.g. digital displays and projection and for excitation applications e.g. for laser pumping and maser excitation, as well as providing valuable ultra-bright light sources to scientists advancing basic research.