Premium
Enabling technologies for robot assisted ultrasound tomography
Author(s) -
Aalamifar Fereshteh,
Khurana Rishabh,
Cheng Alexis,
Guo Xiaoyu,
Iordachita Iulian,
Boctor Emad M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the international journal of medical robotics and computer assisted surgery
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.556
H-Index - 53
eISSN - 1478-596X
pISSN - 1478-5951
DOI - 10.1002/rcs.1746
Subject(s) - computer science , transducer , focus (optics) , tomography , robot , computer vision , artificial intelligence , transmitter , repeatability , tomographic reconstruction , ultrasound , medical physics , acoustics , iterative reconstruction , radiology , telecommunications , medicine , physics , optics , channel (broadcasting) , chemistry , chromatography
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.