In some hospitals, it's routine to give all women in labor an iv, a flexible catheter placed in your vein (usually in the back of your hand or lower arm) to drip in fluids and medication.

But researchers believe it will be a welcome replacement for current standard procedures, which require placing a flexible catheter tube through the nose and down into the esophagus.

Fiber-based OCT system is compact, flexible, and convenient to be combined with fiber catheter, endoscope and other imaging equipments to expand its observing scope and application fields.