Colon lumen exploration with robotized optical coherence tomography catheter

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) shows the ability of real-time diagnosis for the external environment or internal small lumen. OCT has not been applied to larger internal lumen like the colon or stomach due to the difficulty of scanning. In this work, we use a robotized helical scanning probe to explore large lumen. Based on the segmentation of the stabilized OCT image, high accurate distance and quantitative contact feedback are obtained for the robotic scanning. The proposed method for distance/contact feedback shows robustness on both phantom and real deformable colon tissue. The robotic scanning is conducted on the soft phantom.