Robotic-arm-assisted flexible large field-of-view optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a three-dimensional non-invasive high resolution imaging modality that has been widely used for applications ranging from medical diagnosis to industrial inspection. Common OCT systems are equipped with limited field-of-view (FOV) in both the axial depth direction (a few millimeters) and lateral direction (a few centimeters), prohibiting their applications for samples with large and irregular surface profiles. Image stitching techniques exist but are often limited to at most 3 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) scanning. In this work, we propose a robotic-arm-assisted OCT system with 7 DOF for flexible large FOV 3D imaging. The system consists of a depth camera, a robotic arm and a miniature OCT probe with an integrated RGB camera. The depth camera is used to get the spatial information of targeted sample at large scale while the RGB camera is used to obtain the exact position of target to align the image probe. Eventually, the real-time 3D OCT imaging is used to resolve the relative pose of the probe to the sample and as a feedback for imaging pose optimization when necessary. Flexible probe pose manipulation is enabled by the 7 DOF robotic arm. We demonstrate a prototype system and present experimental results with flexible tens of times enlarged FOV for plastic tube, phantom human finger, and letter stamps. It is expected that robotic-arm-assisted flexible large FOV OCT imaging will benefit a wide range of biomedical, industrial and other scientific applications. (c) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement Owing to its advantages of non-invasiveness, high sensitivity, and high resolution, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been increasingly applied from biomedical research to industrial inspection [1-4]. Three-dimensional (3D) and high-resolution OCT images of biological tissue both in vitro and in vivo provide visual, realistic, and comprehensive information about tissue structure as well as disease characteristics that have been used in increasingly more medical research and diagnostic applications. Typical 3D OCT imaging applications include