Design of Zoom Optical System from Visible to NIR-II for Vivo Fluorescence Imaging Device

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Line 10 « to design the optical design” is redundant

Line 11: achromatic, not achromatism

Line 17: “All optical elements adopt standard spherical, which can better correct all kinds of 17 aberrations as well as meet the basic processing requirements of each part”, what does it mean? The lenses are all spherical to have lower aberrations? It should be the opposite

Line 26:

Line 37: “of a good zoom optical lenses”, should be lens singular not plural, or remove the “a” before good

Line 39: how is the system “easy”?  I assume it concerns the utilization but it can be confusing as a reader might think the design in itself is easy. Correct the sentence for example by using « easy to use” or “practical to use”

Line 63: Spherical lens to be replaced by spherical lenses (remove capital letter and use plural)

Line 76: The equations (3) are strange: we have the 1/hi before the sum of the first equation and phi_i before the sum of the second equation, but “i” is the parameter of the sum. Something must be wrong here

Line 77: total focal length, would be more clear to use “effective focal length of the full system”

Line 113: missing “t” in table (“able). Also “design index” to be replaced by design specifications

Line 112: “de-sign” to be replaced by design

Line 126: please give more details and rephase. From the sentences after I understand that you find a patent lens to consider as a starting point and you scale it to get the right focal length? Is it exactly that or something else?

Lines 1122,123, 129, 136, 164, 165 (among others): replace “design structure” by “design layout”

Line 153: replace “de-creasing” by “decreasing”

Line 152: would be interesting to add a reference discussing this improvement of processing efficiency

Line 201: MTF should be defined when it appears first, which is at line 119

At line line 99 it says that the athermalisation will be done later in the paper but I don’t find any mention of this.

Author Response

Reply to the Review Report 1

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

 

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. I really appreciate all your comments and suggestions! Please find my itemized responses in below and my revisions/corrections in the re-submitted files.

 

Thanks again!

 

First of all I have fixed some simple grammar issues and the missing literature citations have been added. [16] 16.  A. Miks and J. Novak, “Paraxial analysis of zoom lens composed of three tunable-focus elements with fixed position of image space focal point and object-image distance,” Opt. Express 22,27056–27062 (2014).

Then the following are the responses to the other important questions in your comments.

 

Line 17: “All optical elements adopt standard spherical, which can better correct all kinds of 17 aberrations as well as meet the basic processing requirements of each part”, what does it mean? The lenses are all spherical to have lower aberrations? It should be the opposite

 

It is true, what I wanted to convey is that these spherical mirror combinations can correct aberrations very well, not can be better than aspheric surface. Here I modified some wording. Replace ‘better’ with ‘well’.

 

Line 39: how is the system “easy”? I assume it concerns the utilization but it can be confusing as a reader might think the design in itself is easy. Correct the sentence for example by using « easy to use” or “practical to use”

 

At this point it is intended to express that the system is easier to use and has been modified to ‘easy-to-use’.

Line 76: The equations (3) are strange: we have the 1/hi before the sum of the first equation and phi_i before the sum of the second equation, but “i” is the parameter of the sum. Something must be wrong here

 

It is h1 not hi, h1 refers to the first surface of the incident light height. Here it is not obvious and what I explain below is not clear, I have modified it.

 

Line 126: please give more details and rephase. From the sentences after I understand that you find a patent lens to consider as a starting point and you scale it to get the right focal length? Is it exactly that or something else?

 

This step is calculated using the achromatic model mentioned above in combination with the device parameter requirements, which in turn finds a relatively compliant initial structure in the patent library. We have made a part of the additional explanation of the basis for the scaling process in the supplementary part of 3.1.

At line line 99 it says that the athermalisation will be done later in the paper but I don’t find any mention of this.

 

As We said in the article, the need for athermal of the system is not strong and can be put to do afterward; the practice requires the design of the lens barrel to match the thermal expansion of the lens, this part is more towards the material and structural design, this part is very important, but not so relevant to the topic of this article-optical design so only a brief introduction is made.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript deals with the optical design of a zoom lens for InGaAs detectors with a spectrum ranging from the visible into the short wave infrared.
As the paper is entirely based on simulation results, without real-world verification, the design methodology should be prominent and clearly presented. However, this is where the text shows some deficiencies. Although all classical points of consideration in an optical design are touched upon, further elaborating on each point recommended. Another point of attention is the logical connection between the different design aspects; this seems to be lacking in the present text thus creating the impression that no real work flow was followed.

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Author Response

Reply to the Review Report 2

 

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

 

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. I really appreciate all your comments and suggestions! Please find my itemized responses in below and my revisions/corrections in the re-submitted files.

 

Thanks again!

 

The manuscript deals with the optical design of a zoom lens for InGaAs detectors with a spectrum ranging from the visible into the short wave infrared.

As the paper is entirely based on simulation results, without real-world verification, the design methodology should be prominent and clearly presented. However, this is where the text shows some deficiencies. Although all classical points of consideration in an optical design are touched upon, further elaborating on each point recommended. Another point of attention is the logical connection between the different design aspects; this seems to be lacking in the present text thus creating the impression that no real work flow was followed.

 

We have further supplemented the design approach in my revision with a detailed explanation of the chromatic aberration section in 2.2 and the initial structure design theory and process in 3.1, which also includes the consideration and selection of a wider variety of optical system parameters.

In the supplementary section, I elaborate in more detail on the theoretical basis for my choice of materials, initial structure, and subsequent optimization operations, and highlight the cause-and-effect relationship between the theory and the design steps in practical applications.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper dealt with the design and performance evaluation of a zoom system capable of responding to the spectral range of 400 nm to 1700 nm for application to Macro vivo fluorescence imaging. The content of the paper lacks originality and does not show novelty, so it is judged not suitable for publication in Applied Science.

 

1. The contents described by the author are about general optical design and are not new. There is a lack of introduction to design techniques suitable for the InGaAS detector claimed in this paper.

2. No special design technique has been introduced to apply to the SWIR (Short-Wave Infrared) fluorescence imaging technology introduced as a major application of the designed optical system. It is necessary to introduce the factors specially considered for fluorescence imaging.

3. The theory of tolerance analysis is also important in the optical design paper, and the tolerance analysis in section 4.2 described by the author was performed using only the functions applied in the existing software. It seems that detailed tolerance analysis contents should be added.

4. The initial design was carried out based on the existing patent, and the design was carried out by increasing the degree of freedom by increasing the number of lenses compared to the existing patented lens. In general, increasing the number of lenses during lens design serves to lower the difficulty of design, so the lens designed in this paper lacks creativity. In addition, it is necessary to mark the reference for the patent used as the initial design.

Author Response

Reply to the Review Report 3

 

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

 

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. I really appreciate all your comments and suggestions! Please find my itemized responses in below and my revisions/corrections in the re-submitted files.

 

Thanks again!

 

This paper dealt with the design and performance evaluation of a zoom system capable of responding to the spectral range of 400 nm to 1700 nm for application to Macro vivo fluorescence imaging. The content of the paper lacks originality and does not show novelty, so it is judged not suitable for publication in Applied Science.

 

We believe that the innovation of this paper mainly lies in the innovation of application scenarios. The problem solved in this paper really originated from a medical instrumentation problem- how to observe in vivo fluorescence imaging at different scales and different wavelengths in a relatively short time.

 

1. The contents described by the author are about general optical design and are not new. There is a lack of introduction to design techniques suitable for the InGaAS detector claimed in this paper.
2. No special design technique has been introduced to apply to the SWIR (Short-Wave Infrared) fluorescence imaging technology introduced as a major application of the designed optical system. It is necessary to introduce the factors specially considered for fluorescence imaging.

 

The design principles and ideas are elaborated in more detail in the article, and the design techniques and considerations suitable for InGaAs detectors and fluorescence imaging are supplemented in 3.1, where both parameter formulation and the design process are covered, and the principles and process of initial structure selection are supplemented to a great extent.

 

3. The theory of tolerance analysis is also important in the optical design paper, and the tolerance analysis in section 4.2 described by the author was performed using only the functions applied in the existing software. It seems that detailed tolerance analysis contents should be added.

 

Tolerance analysis before processing is indeed a very important step, but we believe that tolerance analysis cannot be done without the processing ability of the processor, so a more detailed tolerance analysis will be done together with the processor, based on parameters such as thickness, curvature and material of different lenses, combined with the processing and assembly ability to carry out further analysis of different lenses, instead of a uniform standard for all lenses shown in this paper, the tolerance analysis shown in this paper is more like sensitivity analysis, in the design process to avoid a single lens has a great impact on the overall system image quality.

 

4. The initial design was carried out based on the existing patent, and the design was carried out by increasing the degree of freedom by increasing the number of lenses compared to the existing patented lens. In general, increasing the number of lenses during lens design serves to lower the difficulty of design, so the lens designed in this paper lacks creativity. In addition, it is necessary to mark the reference for the patent used as the initial design.

 

Patent citation added. [15]Ozawa, Toshiro. compact zoom lens. u.s. Patent 4699474-A[P].1987-10-13

It is true that increasing the number of lenses reduces the difficulty of the design, but the design in this article results in 14 spherical lenses, while the patent is for 16 spherical lenses. This is my mistake in writing the article, I took the number of lenses that had been designed in a simple round as the original number of the patent so that the final summary was written as more than the original number of lenses.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

In the answer, the author mentioned that it is innovative to observe in-vivo fluorescence imaging with the method proposed in this paper. It would be nice if you show some more specific examples.

 In Fig. 3, we need a display of the change in lens distance by focal length. By doing so, it is expected that the intuitive understanding of the system schematic will increase.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx