Feasibility of a markerless tracking system based on optical coherence tomography

First published in
Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE  
Number in series
10951
Article Number
1095107
Citation
Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE (10951): 1095107 (2019)
Contribution to Conference
SPIE Medical Imaging, 2019  
Publisher DOI
10.1117/12.2512178
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85068913114
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 spatiooral 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 20mmsô€€€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.