The successful outcome of cancer therapy and treatment depends on the ability to ensure no microscopic residual disease is left behind during the treatment. It is therefore critical to be able to visualize and identify any residual disease being left behind in the tumor bed during resection surgeries, preferably in real-time and in an intraoperative setting. For practical purposes, leaving behind any more than 200 cancerous cells in the tumor bed increases the chance of cancer recurrence -across all cancer types-, highlighting the importance of microscopic residual disease. Recent advancements in fluorescently-tagged targeted molecular probes and imaging agents have enabled a significantly enhanced selectivity in detecting cancer cells, allowing single cell detection using conventional fluorescent imaging techniques. However, these techniques have remained largely impractical in intraoperative settings due to the fact that they rely heavily on large and cumbersome instruments, including rigid optical filters (for color and wavelength selectivity) and focusing lenses to be able to resolve the image from their operating distance. The bulky and rigid optical lenses and filters, required to resolve the weak fluorescence signal from background, are challenging to miniaturize, and restrict the imager to a relatively far working distance from the tumor cells, reducing both the sensitivity and maneuverability within complex tumor cavities. These limitations also impose a minimum size and form factor restriction on these optical imagers, precluding a majority of them from being deemed practical in surgical settings, and particularly hard to maneuver in today’s minimally invasive procedures.