  This paper presents an approach for understanding the soft tissue behavior in
surface contact with a probe scanning the tissue. The application domain is
confocal microlaparoscopy, mostly used for imaging the outer surface of the
organs in the abdominal cavity. The probe is swept over the tissue to collect
sequential images to obtain a large field of view with mosaicking. The problem
we address is that the tissue also moves with the probe due to its softness;
therefore the resulting mosaic is not in the same shape and dimension as
traversed by the probe. Our approach is inspired by the finger slip studies and
adapts the idea of load-slip phenomenon that explains the movement of the soft
part of the finger when dragged on a hard surface. We propose the concept of
loading-distance and perform measurements on beef liver and chicken breast
tissues. We propose a protocol to determine the loading-distance prior to an
automated scan and introduce an approach to compensate the tissue movement in
raster scans. Our implementation and experiments show that we can have an
image-mosaic of the tissue surface in a desired rectangular shape with this
approach.
