EFFICIENT MAGNETIC LOCALIZATION AND ORIENTATION TECHNIQUE FOR CAPSULE ENDOSCOPY

Abstract

To build a new wireless robotic capsule endoscope with external guidance for controllable and interactive GI tract examination, a sensing system is needed for tracking 3D location and 2D orientation of the capsule endoscope movement. An appropriate sensing method is to enclose a small permanent magnet in the capsule. The intensities of the magnetic field produced by the magnet in different spatial points can be measured by the magnetic sensors outside the patient's body. With the sensing data of magnetic sensor array, the 3D location and 2D orientation of the capsule can be calculated. Higher calculation accuracy can be obtained if more sensors and optimal algorithm are applied. In this paper, different nonlinear optimization algorithms were evaluated to solve the magnet's 5D parameters, e.g. Powell's, Downhill Simplex, DIRECT, Multilevel Coordinate Search, and Levenberg Marquardt method. We have found that Levenberg-Marquardt method provides satisfactory calculation accuracy and faster speed. Simulations were done for investigating the de-noise ability of this algorithm based on different sensor arrays. Also the real experiment shows that the results are satisfactory with high accuracy (average localization error is 5.6 mm).