Mechanical design of a distal scanner for confocal microlaparoscope: A conic solution
This work addresses the problem of improving imaging quality on soft tissue for medical laparoscopy, though it appears incremental as it focuses on a specific mechanical design enhancement.
The paper tackled the challenge of performing spiral scans for mosaic-imaging with a confocal microlaparoscope by developing a mechanical design based on a conic structure, resulting in a low-cost, simple-to-implement solution validated through ex vivo experiments and prototype testing.
This paper presents the mechanical design of a distal scanner to perform a spiral scan for mosaic-imaging with a confocal microlaparoscope. First, it is demonstrated with ex vivo experiments that a spiral scan performs better than a raster scan on soft tissue. Then a mechanical design is developed in order to perform the spiral scan. The design in this paper is based on a conic structure with a particular curved surface. The mechanism is simple to implement and to drive; therefore, it is a low-cost solution. A 5:1 scale prototype is implemented by rapid prototyping and the requirements are validated by experiments. The experiments include manual and motor drive of the system. The manual drive demonstrates the resulting spiral motion by drawing the tip trajectory with an attached pencil. The motor drive demonstrates the speed control of the system with an analysis of video thread capturing the trajectory of a laser beam emitted from the tip.