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

Automatic ultrasound acquisitions using medical robots would greatly increase the general usability of medical ultrasound with the added benefits of remote control and built-in intelligence. However, novel methods are required to provide an overall workflow linking robotic systems with ultrasound acquisitions. Based on a newly developed robot for transesophageal echocardiography (TEE), we propose a view-planning platform, an autoadaption method for patient-specific data, and an image-based probe tracking method. With all of these ingredients, a phantom experiment was performed with both openloop and closed-loop positioning methods, aimed at proving the concept of automatic ultrasound acquisition. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the whole workflow and indicated high accuracy of acquisition in terms of keeping desired anatomies in the field of view.