A Design Approach of 3D Optimal Mobile Sensor Array for Confidence-box based Tracking of a Magnetic Capsule

Wireless capsule endoscopy is a painless tool for screening the entire gastrointestinal tract, and magnetic localization is a promising technology for tracking the capsule in the human intestine. In this paper, we propose a novel design approach of the optimal mobile sensor array for tracking the slowly moving capsule. A grid and combinatorial mathematics based method is presented to enumerate all feasible 3D layouts of the four-layer sensor array. The optimal layout with a valid localization range is selected from all layouts by localization accuracy evaluation. The valid localization range of the optimal layout is "confidence-box". Many simulation experiments on different trajectories with different noise levels show the feasibility of our proposed design approach and demonstrate the robustness and accuracy performance of the mobile sensor array based large-scale tracking. The moving capsule can be tracked with the accuracy of 1.9mm and 1.19° in position and orientation, respectively, and the valid localization depth reaches −12.88cm.