Patent ID: 11871906
Assignee: OLYMPUS CORPORATION
Field: Medical technology (Instruments)
Classification: CPC A  G | IPC A

Claim 0:
1. An endoscope system comprising:
a first illumination portion that comprises a first light source and that is configured to radiate a first illumination light beam onto an imaging subject, the first illumination light beam having a spatially nonuniform intensity distribution that contains light portions and dark portions in a beam cross section perpendicular to an optical axis of the first illumination light beam;
a second illumination portion that comprises a second light source, that is configured to radiate a second illumination light beam onto the imaging subject, and that is disposed at a different position from the first illumination portion, the second illumination light beam having a spatially nonuniform intensity distribution that contains light portions and dark portions in a beam cross section perpendicular to an optical axis of the second illumination light beam;
an imager configured to acquire a first illumination image of the imaging subject being illuminated with the first illumination light beam and a second illumination image of the imaging subject being illuminated with the second illumination light beam; and
at least one processor comprising hardware, the processor being configured to:
create a first deep-layer image and a first surface-layer image from the first illumination image and create a second deep-layer image and a second surface-layer image from the second illumination image, the first deep-layer image containing a greater quantity of information about a deep-layer region of the imaging subject than the first surface-layer image does, and the second deep-layer image containing a greater quantity of information about the deep-layer region of the imaging subject than the second surface-layer image does; and
create a combined deep-layer image by combining the first deep-layer image and the second deep-layer image on the basis of pixel values of the first surface-layer image and pixel values of the second surface-layer image.