Electronic endoscope system for shape measurement

In endoscope observation, acquiring shape information of a lesion area is highly demanded for objective and statistical judgment. For in-vivo applications, a high-speed measurement is also considerable. Therefore, we proposed an electronic endoscope system that equips an image fiber and a laser scanner, and achieves the high-speed measurement by using the space-encoding method with laser-scanning. In our experiment, the measurement error was 1∼2% of the distance from the endoscope tip. Moreover the acquired shape information shows that can assist physician for understanding the surface topology of lesion and would be effective in Computer Aided Diagnosis.