A new system design of the multi-view Micro-Ball endoscopy system.

While the wireless endoscopic capsule examining human's large gastrointestinal (GI) cavity, such as stomach and large intestine, many interested spots are omitted by only one or two cameras due to its limited field of view. This paper proposes the new system architecture of the Micro-Ball for medical endoscopy application. Six cameras are embedded in the Micro-Ball for multiple fields of view, which can reduce endoscopic miss rate greatly. Based on this system architecture, a new working mode is proposed. The captured image data are saved in the Flash memory instead of being transmitted outside human body wirelessly. Only less than 6mJ is consumed when the Micro-Ball captures a frame of 480×480 image and writes the image data into the Flash memory. The endoscopic Micro-Ball can work in human's GI tract for 10 hours when the image frame rate is 2 fps. The Micro-Ball endoscopy system is verified on the FPGA-based demonstration system.