Eyes in Ears: A Miniature Steerable Digital Endoscope for Trans-Nasal Diagnosis of Middle Ear Disease.

Eyes in Ears: A Miniature Steerable Digital Endoscope for Trans-Nasal Diagnosis of Middle Ear Disease. Ann Biomed Eng. 2020 May 26;: Authors: Gafford J, Freeman M, Fichera L, Noble J, Labadie R, Webster RJ Abstract The aim of this work is to design, fabricate and experimentally validate a miniature steerable digital endoscope that can provide comprehensive, high-resolution imaging of the middle ear using a trans-nasal approach. The motivation for this work comes from the high incidence of middle ear diseases, and the current reliance on invasive surgery to diagnose and survey these diseases which typically consists of the eardrum being lifted surgically to directly visualize the middle ear using a trans-canal approach. To enable less-invasive diagnosis and surveillance of middle ear disease, we propose an endoscope that is small enough to pass into the middle ear through the Eustachian tube, with a steerable tip that carries a 1 Megapixel image sensor and fiber-optic illumination to provide high-resolution visualization of critical middle ear structures. The proposed endoscope would enable physicians to diagnose middle ear disease using a non-surgical trans-nasal approach instead, enabling such procedures to be performed in an office setting and greatly reducing invasiveness for the patient. In this work, the computational design of the steerable tip based on computed tomography models of real human middle ear anatomy is presented, a...
Source: Annals of Biomedical Engineering - Category: Biomedical Engineering Authors: Tags: Ann Biomed Eng Source Type: research