3D Ultrasound Imaging of Scoliosis with Force-Sensitive Robotic Scanning

The motivation of this work is to develop a robotic system for improving the 3D ultrasound assessment of scoliosis with the Scolioscan machine. The proposed automated approach can liberate sonographers from manipulating the probe over patient's spine (this repetitive and tiring task may case them musculoskeletal complications). The robotic system has the potential to enhance the imaging quality during scanning by ensuring a good acoustic coupling between the probe and tissues. This is done by exploiting force feedback so as to regulate the applied force during the manipulation task. An experimental study is presented to validate the feasibility of the proposed robotic scanning approach.