Axial Motion Compensation Of Optical Coherence Tomography With A Collaborative Medical Robot

This thesis presents an imaging tool consisting of an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging system mounted on a collaborative robotic arm to enable axial motion compensation. Optical Coherence Tomography is a subsurface, high-resolution imaging modality used in neuroimaging to differentiate between pathological and non-pathological tissue. The motivation behind this project is to bring Optical Coherence Tomography to the operating room for neuroimaging to help with cancerous tissue differentiation and maximize the extent of tumor resection. However, neurosurgeons have expressed concern with respect to intracranial pressure (ICP) pulsation displacing the brain far off the optic axis of the imaging system so as to not be visible. The collaborative robotic arm compensates for sample motion along the optic axis using a Proportional controller to track the position of the peak intensity of the sample’s intensity profile, which generally corresponds to the sample surface. Collaborative robots have changed the robot industry paradigm becoming increasingly functional and safer than the previous generations of robotic arms. We present an OCT robot end-effector to test the feasibility of performing OCT imaging with the collaborative robot.