Clinical tracking systems are popular but typically require specific tracking markers. During the last years, scanning speed of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has increased to A-scan rates above 1MHz allowing to acquire volume scans of moving objects. Therefore, we propose a markerless tracking system based on OCT to obtain small volumetric images including information of sub-surface structures at high spatio-temporal resolution. In contrast to conventional vision based approaches, this allows identifying natural landmarks even for smooth and homogeneous surfaces. We describe the optomechanical setup and process ow to evaluate OCT volumes for translations and accordingly adjust the position of the field-of-view to follow moving samples. While our current setup is still preliminary, we demonstrate tracking of motion transversal to the OCT beam of up to 20mms􀀀1 with errors around 0:2mm and even better for some scenarios. Tracking is evaluated on a clearly structured and on a homogeneous phantom as well as on actual tissue samples. The results show that OCT is promising for fast and precise tracking of smooth, monochromatic objects in medical scenarios.

Date Published: 8 March 2019
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 10951, Medical Imaging 2019: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling, 1095107 (8 March 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2512178

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10951:
Medical Imaging 2019: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling
Baowei Fei; Cristian A. Linte, Editor(s)