Autonomous Magnetic Navigation Framework for Active Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Inspired by Conventional Colonoscopy Procedures

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous magnetic navigation system for wireless capsule endoscopy that mimics colonoscopy procedures, enabling efficient, accurate, and minimally supervised navigation in complex intestinal environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel autonomous navigation framework for capsule endoscopy that automates environment exploration and targeted inspection, inspired by conventional colonoscopy techniques.

Findings

Effective navigation in complex tubular environments

High accuracy and repeatability in capsule positioning

Reduced user effort compared to manual operation

Abstract

In recent years, simultaneous magnetic actuation and localization (SMAL) for active wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has been intensively studied to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the examination. In this paper, we propose an autonomous magnetic navigation framework for active WCE that mimics the "insertion" and "withdrawal" procedures performed by an expert physician in conventional colonoscopy, thereby enabling efficient and accurate navigation of a robotic capsule endoscope in the intestine with minimal user effort. First, the capsule is automatically propelled through the unknown intestinal environment and generate a viable path to represent the environment. Then, the capsule is autonomously navigated towards any point selected on the intestinal trajectory to allow accurate and repeated inspections of suspicious lesions. Moreover, we implement the navigation framework on a robotic system incorporated with advanced SMAL algorithms, and validate it in the navigation in various tubular environments using phantoms and an ex-vivo pig colon. Our results demonstrate that the proposed autonomous navigation framework can effectively navigate the capsule in unknown, complex tubular environments with a satisfactory accuracy, repeatability and efficiency compared with manual operation.