Electromagnetic tracking of handheld high-resolution endomicroscopy probes to assist with real-time video mosaicking

Optical fiber bundle based endomicroscopy is a low-cost optical biopsy technique for in vivo cellular level imaging. A limitation of such an imaging system, however, is its small field-of-view (FOV), typically less than 1 mm(2). With such a small FOV it is difficult to associate individual image frames with the larger scale anatomical structure. Video-sequence mosaicking algorithms have been proposed as a solution for increasing the image FOV while maintaining cellular-level resolution by stitching together the endomicroscopy images. Although extensive research has focused on image processing and mosaicking algorithms, there has been limited work on localization of the probe to assist with building high quality mosaics over large areas of tissue. In this paper, we propose the use of electromagnetic (EM) navigation to assist with large-area mosaicking of hand-held high-resolution endomicroscopy probes. A six degree-of-freedom EM sensor is used to track in real-time the position and orientation of the tip of the imaging probe during free-hand scanning. We present a proof-of-principle system for EM-video data co-calibration and registration and then describe a two-step image registration algorithm that assists mosaic reconstruction. Preliminary experimental investigations are carried out on phantoms and ex vivo porcine tissue for free-hand scanning. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology significantly improves the quality and accuracy of reconstructed mosaics compared to reconstructions based only on conventional pair-wise image registration. In principle, this approach can be applied to other optical biopsy techniques such as confocal endomicroscopy and endocytoscopy.