An Intelligent Endoscopic Navigation System

In this paper, the design of an intelligent endoscope navigation system is presented. The proposed intelligent endoscope system is a vision and tactile guided device, developed to facilitate navigation inside a human colon. The design of the entire system is divided into three parts viz. design of an automatic insertion system, a vision and tactile guided system, and a computer control system. The endoscope insertion system which has force sensors is explained. The navigation system is based on the sensory fusion utilizing the quantitative parameters from the captured images and the tactile sensors. An auto-thresholding algorithm is described for extracting the lumen from endoscopic images. A computer control system to control the directional movements of the endoscope is also explained. The proposed endoscope system was tested with animal colons and the experimental observations are discussed.