Minimally invasive medical devices are widely investigated, because of their advantages for in-situ medical examination in real time with highly reduced risk and patient discomfort, as compared to more traditional approaches. Optical biopsy is a prominent example of this trend and provides essential diagnostic information on tissue histopathology in the gastro-intestinal tract. Micro-electro mechanical system technology is demonstrated in this paper to be highly suitable for fabrication of an optical biopsy microsystem, where overall system dimensions and power consumption are key enabling factors. The biopsy microsystem presented is 11.2 mm in diameter and 18.6 mm in length and contains an imaging system with a dedicated image magnification optical microsystem (IMOM) and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Polydimethylsiloxane microlenses have been fabricated using the “hanging droplet” approach and integrated in the IMOM subsystem for achieving an image magnification by a factor 4 and a 30% improvement in optical irradiance from the LED illumination.@en

Medical imaging is an important part of diagnosis. The procedure should provide valuable information for diagnosis and, at the same time, should be minimally invasive for the patient. Therefore, when performing endoscopic imaging, a system with reduced dimensions is crucial. The performance of imaging systems, used in several diagnosis endoscopic procedures, would highly benefit from the integration of an imaging magnification optical microsystem (IMOM) able to perform in vivo and real-time tissue microscopy. This paper proposes a miniaturized IMOM: its total length is 12.164 mm and has a lateral lens assembly of 3.894 mm. A microfabricated PDMS lens was included in the system, obtained by a hanging droplet approach, a very low-cost and effective method. A paraxial magnification of 4–14 times was achieved with a good performance in every optical analysis evaluated. A modulation transfer function around 38 % at 50 lp/mm was obtained and maximum distortion about 1.8 %.@en