Novel optical fluorescence imaging probe for the investigation of biological function at the microscopic level

Existing optic fibre-bundle based imaging probes have been successfully used to image biological signals from tissue in direct contact with the probe tip (Hirano et al. 1996). These fibre-bundle probe systems employed conventional fluorescence microscopy and thus lacked spatial filtering or a scanned light source, two features used by laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSCMs) to improve signal quality. Improving the methods of imaging tissue in its natural state, deep in-vivo and at cellular resolution is an ever-present goal in biological research. Within this study, a novel (580