Design, testing and modelling of a novel robotic system for trans‐oesophageal ultrasound

Abstract

Robotic assistance provided by the proposed system may improve the TOE operating environment. The proposed forward kinematic model can be further employed for automatic control. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Robotic Ultrasound: View Planning, Tracking, and Automatic Acquisition of Transesophageal Echocardiography

“…The slave system (the robot) is driven wirelessly via Bluetooth communication and has several mechanisms for holding and manipulating the original probe. Our previous work [5] on evaluating the precision of the robotic system in free space demonstrated a high repeatability of the probe positioning with a mean error of 0.6 mm and 0.3 deg for the translation axis; 1.3 mm and 0.9 deg for axial rotation; and 0.6 mm and 0.8 deg for bidirectional bending. Since each individual degree of freedom is driven by a different motor, multiple axes of the robot can be driven simultaneously in any combination.…”

“…These problems may be addressed by remotely operated ultrasound systems employing robotic techniques. Our previous design of the first TEE robot has demonstrated the capability of remote control [5].…”

“…This method, though primarily designed for TEE, has the potential to be adapted for other intraoperative ultrasound, such as trans-rectal or intra-cardiac imaging. Other aspects of the proposed TEE robot, including safety and force sensing, have been briefly discussed in our previous work [5]. Since the current paper focuses on automation and tracking, the topics of safety and force sensing are not included here.…”

“…Additionally, electronic steering of the ultrasound beam is modelled by rotating the 2-D ultrasound plane. Details of the modelling procedure have been presented in [5]. Desirable views are found by manual interaction with the view-planning software.…”

Probe Tracking and Its Application in Automatic Acquisition Using a Trans-Esophageal Ultrasound Robot

“…A recently developed robotic system for TEE has made remote control possible [4] and we have subsequently proposed an automatic acquisition workflow (as shown in Fig. 1) [5] using this robot based on a view-planning platform for path-panning and an ultrasound-to-MR registration method [6] for locating the probe position when applying feedback.…”