Multimode Fibres: Seeing through chaos

Small, fiber-based endoscopes already improved our ability to image deep within the human body. An exciting new approach introduced recently utilized disordered light within extremely compact multimode optical fibres. The two most important limitations of this exciting technology are (i) the lack of bending flexibility (transformation matrix is only valid as long as the fibre remains stationary) and (ii) high demands on computational power, making the performance of such systems slow. We discuss possible routes to allow additional flexibility of such endoscopes by broader understanding of light transport processes within. We show that typical fibers retain highly ordered propagation of light over remarkably larger distances, which allows correction operators to be introduced in imaging geometries to maintain high-quality performance in such flexible micro-endoscopes. Separately, we introduce a GPU toolbox to make these techniques faster and more accessible to researchers.