Untangled modes in multimode fibres for flexible microendoscopy

Small, fibre-based endoscopes have already improved our ability to image deep within the human body. A novel approach introduced recently utilised disordered light within a standard multimode optical fibre for lensless imaging. Importantly, this approach brought very significant reduction of the instruments footprint to dimensions below 100 μm. The most important limitations of this exciting technology is the lack of bending flexibility - imaging is only possible as long as the fibre remains stationary. The only route to allow flexibility of such endoscopes is in trading-in all the knowledge about the optical system we have, particularly the cylindrical symmetry. In perfect cylindrical waveguides we can find optical modes that do not change their spatial distribution as they propagate through. We show that typical fibers retain such highly ordered propagation of light over remarkably large distances, which allows correction operators to be introduced in imaging geometries in order to maintain high-quality performance even in such flexible micro-endoscopes.