Design of video-rate image acquisition system for confocal laser endoscopy

A practical technique, known as Confocal laser endoscopy with the ability of super high magnification and sensitivity, uses a pinhole to reduce the stray light from the samples before and after the focal plane, leading to greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and axial resolution. The algorithm and the computational efficiency of the image acquisition system as one of the key modules of confocal laser endoscopy significantly influence the imaging quality and timeliness of endoscopy. Therefore, it is necessary to design an image acquisition system with good image quality, fast image refreshing and user-friendly interface to improve the use effect of confocal laser endoscopy and the working efficiency for the doctors. In this paper, a high-frame-rate data acquisition system is designed for the scanning and imaging process of confocal laser endoscopy. By using hybrid programming between C# and C++, the acquisition system able to effectively utilize the computational efficiency of C++ language and the flexible graphical interface support of C# language. The WPF framework is used to realize image display and translation scaling, which can help operators to observe samples. In this paper, we have established a test system and tested the related performance indicators. The experimental results show that this image acquisition system of confocal laser endoscopy can achieve a 512×512 pixel imaging with the speed up to 15 frames/s, and correct each frame of the image in real time.