Enabling technologies for robot assisted ultrasound tomography

Abstract

Currently available ultrasound (US) tomography systems suggest utilizing cylindrical transducers that can be used for a specific organ. In this paper, our focus is on an alternative way of creating US tomographic images that could be used for other anatomies and more general applications. This system consists of two conventional US probes facing each other while one or several of the transducers in one probe can act as the transmitter and the rest as the receiver. Aligning the two US probes is a challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a robot assisted US tomography system in which one probe is operated freehanded and another by a robotic arm. In this paper, enabling technologies for this system are described. With the current prototype, a reconstruction precision of 4.12, 1.73, and 2.23 mm for the three calibrations, and an overall alignment repeatability in the range of 5-9 mm were achieved. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ultrasound thermal monitoring with an external ultrasound source for customized bipolar RF ablation shapes

“…Ultrasound tomography reconstruction techniques generally require a circular ultrasound gantry to transmit and receive the signals from multiple angles [6], but the required data acquisition time for the multiple projections degrades the temporal resolution. Robot-assisted ultrasound tomography where two conventional ultrasound probes are aligned has also been proposed [7]. This approach does not require a special ultrasound array design, but utilizes a robot control unit.…”