Clinical tracking systems are popular but typically require specific tracking markers.
During the last years, scanning speed of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has increased
to A-scan rates above 1 MHz allowing to acquire volume scans of moving objects. Therefore,
we propose a markerless tracking system based on OCT to obtain small volumetric images
including information of sub-surface structures at high spatio-temporal resolution.
In contrast to conventional vision based approaches, this allows identifying natural
landmarks even for smooth and homogeneous surfaces. We describe the optomechanical
setup and process flow to evaluate OCT volumes for translations and accordingly adjust
the position of the field-of-view to follow moving samples. While our current setup
is still preliminary, we demonstrate tracking of motion transversal to the OCT beam
of up to 20 mm s(-1) with errors around 0.2 mm and even better for some scenarios.
Tracking is evaluated on a clearly structured and on a homogeneous phantom as well
as on actual tissue samples. The results show that OCT is promising for fast and precise
tracking of smooth, monochromatic objects in medical scenarios.
