Mechanical design of a distal scanner for confocal microlaparoscope: A conic solution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, mechanically simple conic-structured distal scanner for confocal microlaparoscopes, demonstrating improved spiral scanning performance over raster scans through experiments on soft tissue.

Contribution

It presents a novel conic mechanical design for a spiral scanner in confocal microlaparoscopes, validated with a prototype and experimental results.

Findings

Spiral scan outperforms raster scan on soft tissue imaging.

The conic design enables simple, low-cost implementation.

Prototype experiments confirm effective manual and motor-driven operation.

Abstract

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.