Meta-fibres: Optical fibres with meta-surfaces for advanced optical biopsy through needles

My 7-year vision for this fellowship is to design, build and test hair-thin imaging devices that can better see diseases such as cancer in previously inaccessible areas of the body. Cancers occurring deep in the body are hard to detect due to their inaccessibility via natural orifices: ovarian cancer has a 50% 5-year survival rate while for pancreatic cancer this is just 1%.

Early detection of these cancers could allow surgeons to treat or remove them before they spread, dramatically improving survival. However, early cancer is only subtly different to healthy tissue so accurate detection requires very high resolution imaging, much higher than MRI or X-rays. Imaging using light achieves this resolution but requires the camera to be very close to the tissue being examined, which is difficult for internal organs like the pancreas.

In this fellowship, I am overcoming this limitation by developing a new generation of devices that take images through optical fibres: hair-thin pieces of glass that fit inside tiny needles and can be harmlessly inserted deep into the body.

Progress: During the first 3-years of my fellowship I have built a team of 7 people (3 post-docs, 3 Ph.D. students, 1 intern) and led them to develop two new technologies that enable my overall vision. First, a nanotechnology technique for making tiny (