Design of a high numerical aperture achromatic objective lens for endomicroscopy

An achromatic objective lens with the object-space numerical aperture (NA) of 0.7 is designed for endomicroscopy applications for in vivo diagnosis of cancer. For these applications, it is required that the size of the optical components be no more than the diameter of a biopsy needle. The challenges associated with designing such an optical system are discussed. The clear aperture size for the lens is set to 1.5 mm. The lens is achromatic for the wavelength range from 452 to 623 nm. The system was designed and optimized using CODE V optical design software. The performance of the design is analyzed and found to be within the design requirements. Tolerance analysis is also performed to check the robustness of the design.