Evaluation of the three-dimensional endoscope system for assessing the gastrointestinal motility

This paper described evaluation of the three-dimensional endoscope system for assessing the gastrointestinal motility. Gastrointestinal diseases are mainly based on the morphological or anatomical abnormity. However, sometimes the gastrointestinal symptoms are apparent without visible abnormalities. Such diseases are called functional gastrointestinal disorder, for example, functional dyspepsia, and irritable bowel syndrome. One of the major factors of these diseases is the gastrointestinal dysmotility. Assessment procedures for motor function are either invasive, or indirect. We thus propose a three-dimensional endoscope system for assessing the gastrointestinal motility. To assess the dynamic motility of the stomach, three-dimensional endoscopic imaging of stomach lining is performed. Propagating contraction waves are detected by subtracting estimated stomach geometry without contraction waves from one with contraction waves. After detecting constriction waves, their frequency, amplitude, and speed of propagation can be calculated. In this study, we evaluate the proposed system. First, we evaluate the developed three-dimensional endoscope system by a flat plane. This system can measure the geometry of the flat plane with an error of less than 10 percent of the distance between endoscope tip and the object. Then we confirm the validity of a prototype system by a wave simulated model. The detected wave is approximated by a Gaussian function. In the experiment, the amplitude and position of the wave can be measure with 1 mm accuracy. These results suggest that the proposed system can measure the speed and amplitude of contraction. In the future, we evaluate the proposed system in vivo experiments.