Surface Scanning for Navigation Using High-Speed Optical Coherence Tomography

Abstract Medical interventions are often guided by optical tracking systems and optical coherence tomography has shown promising results for markerless tracking of soft tissue. The high spatial resolution and subsurface information contain valuable information about the underlying tissue structure and tracking of certain target structures is in principle possible. However, the small field-of-view complicates the selection of suitable regions-of-interest for tracking. Therefore, we extend an experimental setup and perform volumetric surface scanning of target structures to enlarge the field-of-view. We show that the setup allows for data acquisition and that precise merging of the volumes is possible with mean absolute errors from 0.041mm to 0.097mm.