Novel stent optical inspection system

Abstract

Stent quality control is a critical process. Coronary stents have to be inspected 100% so no defective stent is implanted into a human body. Skilled operators currently perform the quality process control visually, and every stent could need tens of minutes to be inspected. In this paper, a novel stent optical inspection system is presented. By the combination of a high numerical aperture microscope, a triple illumination optical system, a rotational stage, and a line-scan camera, unrolled sections of the outer and inner surfaces of the stent are obtained with high resolution at high speed. We expect with this new approach to make the stent inspection task more objective and to dramatically reduce the time and the overall cost of the stent quality control process.