Robotic Ultrasound Scanning With Real-Time Image-Based Force Adjustment: Quick Response for Enabling Physical Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During an ultrasound (US) scan, the sonographer is in close contact with the patient, which puts them at risk of COVID-19 transmission. In this paper, we propose a robot-assisted system that automatically scans tissue, increasing sonographer/patient distance and decreasing contact duration between them. This method is developed as a quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the preferences of the sonographers in terms of how US scanning is done and can be trained quickly for different applications. Our proposed system automatically scans the tissue using a dexterous robot arm that holds US probe. The system assesses the quality of the acquired US images in real-time. This US image feedback will be used to automatically adjust the US probe contact force based on the quality of the image frame. The quality assessment algorithm is based on three US image features: correlation, compression and noise characteristics. These US image features are input to the SVM classifier, and the robot arm will adjust the US scanning force based on the SVM output. The proposed system enables the sonographer to maintain a distance from the patient because the sonographer does not have to be holding the probe and pressing against the patient's body for any prolonged time. The SVM was trained using bovine and porcine biological tissue, the system was then tested experimentally on plastisol phantom tissue. The result of the experiments shows us that our proposed quality assessment algorithm successfully maintains US image quality and is fast enough for use in a robotic control loop.

Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion: vernetzte, lernfähige Maschinen in der Medizin

“…The physician is connected through a leader robot to control the robot at the diagnostic station [7]. Similar efforts have been done in [8] for ultrasound scanning.…”

Review of Machine Learning in Lung Ultrasound in COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Some studies use AI-robotics to perform tele-examination of patients [ 113 , 114 ], including a telerobotic system to scan LUS on a COVID patient [ 115 ]. These robot-assisted systems can increase the distance between sonographers and patients, thus minimizing the transmission risk [ 116 ]. In addition, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are integrated with cloud and AI to monitor and prognose COVID-19 disease [ 117 , 118 ].…”

Using Privacy Respecting Sound Analysis to Improve Bluetooth Based Proximity Detection for COVID-19 Exposure Tracing and Social Distancing

“…In these cases it is helpful to support social distancing and contract tracing by technically aided approaches [7]. There are a series of sensing modalities with distance or proximity monitoring as a basic functionality, such as ultrasound [8][9][10], Ultra Wide Band (UWB) [11][12][13], magnetic field [14,15], electric field [16], visual-based sensing [17] etc. Ultrasound and UWB are wave-based active approaches that would be able to deliver distance information with a very high accuracy but suffer from the large amount of deployment work, and are only suitable for indoor distance monitoring.…”