Adaptive Simultaneous Magnetic Actuation and Localization for WCE in a Tubular Environment
This work addresses the challenge of active wireless capsule endoscopy for medical diagnostics by improving actuation and localization in complex tubular environments, representing an incremental advancement with domain-specific applications.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently propelling and precisely locating a wireless capsule endoscope in tubular environments by developing an adaptive simultaneous magnetic actuation and localization system, achieving convincing performance in actuation efficiency, workspace size, robustness, localization accuracy, and update frequency compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Simultaneous Magnetic Actuation and Localization (SMAL) is a promising technology for active wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE). In this paper, an adaptive SMAL system is presented to efficiently propel and precisely locate a capsule in a tubular environment with complex shapes. In order to track the capsule with high localization accuracy and update frequency in a large workspace, we propose a mechanism that can automatically activate a sub-array of sensors with the optimal layout during the capsule movement. The improved multiple objects tracking (IMOT) method is simplified and adapted to our system to estimate the 6-D pose of the capsule in real time. Also, we study the locomotion of a magnetically actuated capsule in a tubular environment, and formulate a method to adaptively adjust the pose of the actuator to improve the propulsion efficiency. Our presented methods are applicable to other permanent magnet-based SMAL systems, and help to improve the actuation efficiency of active WCE. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed system in extensive experiments on phantoms and ex-vivo animal organs. The results demonstrate that our system can achieve convincing performance compared with the state-of-the-art ones in terms of actuation efficiency, workspace size, robustness, localization accuracy and update frequency.