The Focused Assessment with Sonography in Trauma (FAST) exam is a critical tool for initial screening and triage of trauma cases. The need to offer this exam despite the lack of access to experienced sonographers in the field motivate this work. While past works have attempted to address automating the FAST exam, the solutions offered do not account for the chaotic nature of field triage with multiple medics working on the patient simultaneously. This paper offers a solution whereby custom low-cost robotic skins can be added to any lightweight robot to allow the robot to operate safely around medics. The skin offers contact detection and localization, along with an added padding for passive safety. A formulation of the contact detection, force sensing, and localization is presented by leveraging solutions of the rigid point-based registration problem, first-order stiffness modeling, and an active compliance control strategy. A high-level active compliance redundancy resolution strategy is presented and verified to allow users to safely move the body of the robot out of the way while the robot maintains a high-quality ultrasound image of a region of interest. These results present a first step towards a mobile deployable ultrasound triage platform for FAST.
Veliky et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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