The present invention relates to diagnostic imaging inside the human body. In particular, the present invention relates to system and method for protecting archived image frames and other data captured by the capsule device.
Devices for imaging body cavities or passages in vivo are known in the art and include endoscopes and autonomous encapsulated cameras. Endoscopes are flexible or rigid tubes that pass into the body through an orifice or surgical opening, typically into the esophagus via the mouth or into the colon via the rectum. An image is formed at the distal end using a lens and transmitted to the proximal end, outside the body, either by a lens-relay system or by a coherent fiber-optic bundle. A conceptually similar instrument might record an image electronically at the distal end, for example using a CCD or CMOS array, and transfer the image data as an electrical signal to the proximal end through a cable. Endoscopes allow a physician control over the field of view and are well-accepted diagnostic tools. However, they do have a number of limitations, present risks to the patient, are invasive and uncomfortable for the patient, and their cost restricts their application as routine health-screening tools.
Because of the difficulty traversing a convoluted passage, endoscopes cannot reach the majority of the small intestine and special techniques and precautions, that add cost, are required to reach the entirety of the colon. Endoscopic risks include the possible perforation of the bodily organs traversed and complications arising from anesthesia. Moreover, a trade-off must be made between patient pain during the procedure and the health risks and post-procedural down time associated with anesthesia. Endoscopies are necessarily inpatient services that involve a significant amount of time from clinicians and thus are costly.
An alternative in vivo image sensor that addresses many of these problems is capsule endoscope. A camera is housed in a swallowable capsule, along with a radio transmitter for transmitting data, primarily comprising images recorded by the digital camera, to a base-station receiver or transceiver and data recorder outside the body. The capsule may also include a radio receiver for receiving instructions or other data from a base-station transmitter. Instead of radio-frequency transmission, lower-frequency electromagnetic signals may be used. Power may be supplied inductively from an external inductor to an internal inductor within the capsule or from a battery within the capsule.
An autonomous capsule camera system with on-board data storage was disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 7,983,458, entitled “In Vivo Autonomous Camera with On-Board Data Storage or Digital Wireless Transmission in Regulatory Approved Band,” granted on Jul. 19, 2011. This patent describes a capsule system using on-board storage such as semiconductor nonvolatile archival memory to store captured images. After the capsule passes from the body, it is retrieved. Capsule housing is opened and the images stored are transferred to a computer workstation for storage and analysis. For capsule images either received through wireless transmission or retrieved from on-board storage, the images will have to be displayed and examined by diagnostician to identify potential anomalies.
Illuminating system 12A may be implemented by LEDs. In
Optical system 14A, which may include multiple refractive, diffractive, or reflective lens elements, provides an image of the lumen walls on image sensor 16. Image sensor 16 may be provided by charged-coupled devices (CCD) or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) type devices that convert the received light intensities into corresponding electrical signals. Image sensor 16 may have a monochromatic response or include a color filter array such that a color image may be captured (e.g. using the RGB or CYM representations). The analog signals from image sensor 16 are preferably converted into digital form to allow processing in digital form. Such conversion may be accomplished using an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, which may be provided inside the sensor (as in the current case), or in another portion inside capsule housing 10. The A/D unit may be provided between image sensor 16 and the rest of the system. LEDs in illuminating system 12A are synchronized with the operations of image sensor 16. Processing module 22 may be used to provide processing required for the system such as image processing and video compression. The processing module may also provide needed system control such as to control the LEDs during image capture operation. The processing module may also be responsible for other functions such as managing image capture and coordinating image retrieval.
After the capsule camera traveled through the GI tract and exits from the body, the capsule camera is retrieved and the images stored in the archival memory are read out through the output port. The received images are usually transferred to a base station for processing and for a diagnostician to examine. The accuracy as well as efficiency of diagnostics is most important. A diagnostician is expected to examine all images and correctly identify all anomalies. In order to help the diagnostician to perform the examination more efficiently without compromising the quality of examination, the received images are subject to processing of the present invention by displaying multiple sub-sequences of the images in multiple viewing windows concurrently. The desire of using multiple viewing windows is not restricted to the conventional capsule camera. For capsule cameras having panoramic view, the need for efficient viewing for diagnostics also arises.
Besides the above mentioned forward-looking capsule cameras, there are other types of capsule cameras that provide side view or panoramic view. A side or reverse angle is required in order to view the tissue surface properly. Conventional devices are not able to see such surfaces, since their FOV is substantially forward looking. It is important for a physician to see all areas of these organs, as polyps or other irregularities need to be thoroughly observed for an accurate diagnosis. Since conventional capsules are unable to see the hidden areas around the ridges, irregularities may be missed, and critical diagnoses of serious medical conditions may be flawed. A camera configured to capture a panoramic image of an environment surrounding the camera is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,817,354, entitled “Panoramic Imaging System”, granted on Oct. 19, 2010. The panoramic camera is configured with a longitudinal field of view (FOV) defined by a range of view angles relative to a longitudinal axis of the capsule and a latitudinal field of view defined by a panoramic range of azimuth angles about the longitudinal axis such that the camera can capture a panoramic image covering substantially a 360° latitudinal FOV.
After autonomous capsule camera was introduced in the early 2000, the state of the art has been advanced continually. For example, the advancement in electronic technology includes, but not limited to, the ever decreasing of semiconductor feature size according to the proven Moore's law for integrating more transistors with lower power consumption and higher speed operation in a single chip. With the advancement in electronic technology, a larger number of pixels can reside in one CMOS image sensor and the processing of the increased information can be facilitated by the increasing computational power of the processor. On the other hand, the increasing amount of image and other sensing data can be stored in larger memory capacity are brought about by the scaling down of electronic feature size. The case is also true for a capsule system with external storage and the data is transmitted wirelessly from the capsule within the body.
In addition to the increase of resolution, the frame rate for capsule images also increases by leaps and bounds from a frame rate of about 2 per second in early 2000 to over 30 in peak rate in late 2000. The increased frame rate can reduce the un-imaged gaps between subsequent images so as to increase detection rate of anomaly. However, the detection rate of anomaly or any feature of interest may not increase proportionally to the increase of frame rate. The improvement in the detection rate may be diminishing, particularly at higher frame rates.
For a capsule system with on-board storage, the reliability of image data stored in the memory device is extremely crucial. The admission of a capsule camera will require substantial preparation for a patient to purge the waste in the GI tract. If the memory device fails, not only the efforts but also the money associated with the capsule device and services are wasted. Even if the memory device fails partially, the examination result will be compromised. Therefore, it is desired to improve the reliability of data storage without substantially increase system cost and/or power consumption for the capsule system with on-board storage. For a capsule system with wireless transmitter, it will face similar reliability issue. If the wireless transmission channel is affected by noises, interferences or other channel impairments, valuable images may be lost. Therefore, it is also desirable to improve the reliability of wireless transmission without substantially increase system cost and/or system power consumption for the capsule system with a wireless transmitter.
The present invention discloses reliable image storage for a capsule camera device comprising a light source, an image sensor, an archival memory or a wireless transmitter, and a processing module within a housing. The processing module is configured to store the image frames in the archival memory or to transmit the image frames using the wireless transmitter so that any N consecutive image frames are split in two or more non-contiguous memory areas of the archival memory or two or more separate wireless channels. Alternatively, at least one of the N consecutive image frames is stored in both the non-contiguous memory areas of the archival memory or transmitted at both of the wireless channels. N is an integer determined according to an image frame rate. In one embodiment, the processing module is configured to generate a first sequence and a second sequence from the image frames, and the first sequence is stored in a first memory area of said two or more non-contiguous memory areas or transmitted at a first wireless channel of said two or more separate channels, and the second sequence is stored in a second memory area of said two or more non-contiguous memory areas or transmitted at a second wireless channel of said two or more separate channels. The archival memory may comprise multiple chips or multiple dies, and the first memory area and the second memory area use different chips or different dies. The first sequence and the second sequence may be generated by interleaving the image frames. For example, the first sequence corresponds to odd-numbered pictures of the image frames and the second sequence corresponds to even-numbered pictures of the image frames. The two or more separate wireless channels may correspond to two or more channels at two or more different frequencies in a frequency division multiple access (FDMA) system, two or more different time slots in a time division multiple access (TDMA) system, or two or more frequency-time cells in a combined FDMA-TDMA system
In another embodiment, the processing module is configured to detect a significant image frame having significant content change from a previous image frame or having significant diagnostic feature, and to repeat the significant image frame in both the first sequence and the second sequence. The processing module may further comprise a data reduction module to reduce data storage requirement for the first sequence and the second sequence. The data reduction module can be configured to measure motion metric between two image frames. The data reduction module can also be configured to perform video compression.
It will be readily understood that the components of the present invention, as generally described and illustrated in the figures herein, may be arranged and designed in a wide variety of different configurations. Thus, the following more detailed description of the embodiments of the systems and methods of the present invention, as represented in the figures, is not intended to limit the scope of the invention, as claimed, but is merely representative of selected embodiments of the invention.
Reference throughout this specification to “one embodiment,” “an embodiment,” or similar language means that a particular feature, structure, or characteristic described in connection with the embodiment may be included in at least one embodiment of the present invention. Thus, appearances of the phrases “in one embodiment” or “in an embodiment” in various places throughout this specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment.
Furthermore, the described features, structures, or characteristics may be combined in any suitable manner in one or more embodiments. One skilled in the relevant art will recognize, however, that the invention can be practiced without one or more of the specific details, or with other methods, components, etc. In other instances, well-known structures, or operations are not shown or described in detail to avoid obscuring aspects of the invention.
The illustrated embodiments of the invention will be best understood by reference to the drawings, wherein like parts are designated by like numerals throughout. The following description is intended only by way of example, and simply illustrates certain selected embodiments of apparatus and methods that are consistent with the invention as claimed herein.
The present invention discloses a system and method to increase the reliability of the image and data storage in the on-board memory or the reliability of wireless transmission. A memory chip may fully fail so that the entire memory becomes useless. A memory chip may also fail partially such as a section or a bank of memory cells fails. It is also possible that some random bits in the memory fail. When the whole memory fails, all image data becomes unavailable. However, if a section or a bank of memory fails, or a die or a chip in a multi-chip or multi-die module fails, partial image data will become unavailable. Since image data is usually stored in the memory device contiguously, partial memory failure may cause consecutive image frames unavailable. If these unavailable image frames happen to be associated with a portion of the gastrointestinal (GI) track with anomaly, the memory failure will cause a failure in detecting the anomaly. An observation of the capsule images indicates that an anomaly usually will last for multiple image frames. If the image frames are stored in separate sections, banks, chips or dies, at least some image frames in a segment of consecutive image frames may be preserved. Therefore, the anomaly may still be detected when partial memory failure occurs. Similarly, the captured image frames may be lost or damaged during wireless transmission due to noises, interferences, or other channel impairments. If the image frames are transmitted in separate wireless channels, at least some image frames in a segment of consecutive image frames may be preserved.
Accordingly, storing consecutive image frames in multiple non-contiguous memory areas or transmitting consecutive image frames in multiple separate wireless channels may lends a reliable means to protect image data from memory failure or transmission errors. The archival memory may also be used to store other sensing data or system data. The archival memory may correspond to a single memory chip, multiple chips or multi-chip module, or uses other chip or die packaging technology to provide required storage space with limited footage. In one embodiment, each image frame is simultaneously stored in two memory locations and preferably the two memory locations are located in two separate memory sections, banks, chips or dies as shown in
The embodiment illustrated in
While
A side benefit of this embodiment is to relief the constraint on memory write time for the archival memory when the separate memory areas correspond to separate chips or dies with separate write ports. Since the archival memory is implemented based on non-volatile memory, the archival memory usually has a slower write time. In the system with increased image resolution and increased frame rate, the archival memory may not be able to support the high write speed required or it would increase cost of the archival memory to support the high write speed. In the example shown in
During the course of travelling through the body lumen, the capsule moves slowly as propelled by peristalsis movement. However, sometimes the capsule may undergoes quick movement momentarily and two consecutive image frames may correspond to very different scenes. If such image frames are separated into different sequences, important diagnostic features may appear in one sequence, but not in the other. Therefore, the embodiment according to
During the course of travelling through the body lumen, the capsule camera may capture tens or hundreds of thousands of image frames. In order to conserve storage space, various techniques have been developed in the field to reduce required storage. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,983,458 discloses a technique that captures an image only when the measured motion metric exceeds a threshold. In U.S. Pat. No. 8,165,374, a motion-compensated video compression technique is applied to the image frames to substantially reduce the storage requirement at the expense of more complicated processing. Any of the data reduction techniques can be applied to the multiple sequences before the multiple sequences are stored in the separate memory areas.
After the capsule is retrieved upon its exit from the human body, the multiple sequences can be downloaded to a workstation for further processing or viewing. The multiple sequences can be rejoined into a single sequence for viewing if both sequences can be retrieved. Alternatively, each of the multiple sequences can be processed or viewed separately without rejoining. If one sequence is lost due to memory failure, the other sequence can still be used by itself for processing or viewing.
In the above examples, a system with archival memory is used as an example to illustrate robust memory storage to improve reliability of stored image frames. For a capsule system with wireless transmission, the non-contiguous memory areas are replaced by multiple wireless channels to prevent loss of N consecutive image frames. The wireless system may use frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), or a combination of FDMA and TDMA to support multiple channels. For example, a capsule system may use two separate wireless channels corresponding to two different frequencies in an FDMA system to transmitted two separate image sequences. The FDMA, TDMA and FDMA-TDMA systems are well known in the field of wireless communication and the details are not repeated here.
The invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from its spirit or essential characteristics. The described examples are to be considered in all respects only as illustrative and not restrictive. The scope of the invention is, therefore, indicated by the appended claims rather than by the foregoing description. All changes which come within the meaning and range of equivalency of the claims are to be embraced within their scope.
The present invention is related to U.S. Pat. No. 7,983,458, entitled “in vivo Autonomous Camera with On-Board Data Storage or Digital Wireless Transmission in Regulatory Approved Band”, granted on Jul. 19, 2011 and to U.S. Pat. No. 7,817,354, entitled “Panoramic Imaging System”, granted on Oct. 19, 2010. These U.S. patents are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind |
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PCT/US13/63327 | 10/3/2013 | WO | 00 |