Automated Robotic Surface Scanning With Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a near-infrared light based imaging modality that enables depth scans with a high spatial resolution. By scanning along the lateral dimensions, high-resolution volumes can be acquired. This allows to characterize tissue and precisely detect abnormal structures in medical scenarios. However, its small field of view (FOV) limits the applicability of OCT for medical examinations. We therefore present an automated setup to move an OCT scan head over arbitrary surfaces. By mounting the scan head to a highly accurate robot arm, we obtain precise information about the position of the acquired volumes. We implement a geometric approach to stitch the volumes and generate the surface scans. Our results show that a precise stitching of the volumes is achieved with mean absolute errors of 0.078 mm and 0.098 mm in the lateral directions and 0.037 mm in the axial direction. We can show that our setup provides automated surface scanning with OCT of samples and phantoms larger than the usual FOV.