Design of a smart-device and FPGA based wireless capsule endoscopic system

Abstract

The paper presents a modular and programmable design of a next generation wireless capsule endoscopic system (WCES). The system is developed on a single, low-power, 65-nm field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) chip that interfaces directly with Android based smart-devices (smartphone or tablet) and consumes 12.42mW of power. As a result, image data from an endoscopic capsule can be saved (or viewed) directly on smart-device, tablet, laptop, workstation or secured server connected to a hospital's or residential Wi-Fi network. This eliminates the need to carry a bulky data logger and enables medical doctors to analyze data and perform diagnosis in real time from a remote place. The system supports full-duplex data communication between the endoscopic capsule and smart-device which further allows doctors to control many features of the capsule in real-time. Due to the flexible and reprogrammable nature of the system, various image processing and compression algorithms can be employed without any change in hardware. The system supports multi-spectral imaging including white light imaging (WLI) and narrow band imaging (NBI). A variable-length, low-complexity image compression algorithm is used that is based on a novel color-space followed by an optimized Golomb-rice coding. The entire system is prototyped using circular PCBs with a size of 16mm×36mm. An Android mobile app is designed with many features to control the operation of the capsule as well as display the captured images. Both in vivo and ex vivo trials using live pig have been conducted to validate the advantage of the proposed system.