Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound System for Liver Follow-up Diagnosis: Pilot Phantom Study
This addresses the healthcare burden of chronic liver disease in local communities by potentially reducing time and costs for providers and patients, though it is an incremental advance in robotic medical imaging.
The paper tackles the problem of automating liver follow-up scans for outpatients by developing an autonomous robotic ultrasound system that uses CT images and 3D registration to precisely target hepatic veins, with evaluation on a phantom showing reliable target localization in repeated trials.
The paper introduces a novel autonomous robot ultrasound (US) system targeting liver follow-up scans for outpatients in local communities. Given a computed tomography (CT) image with specific target regions of interest, the proposed system carries out the autonomous follow-up scan in three steps: (i) initial robot contact to surface, (ii) coordinate mapping between CT image and robot, and (iii) target US scan. Utilizing 3D US-CT registration and deep learning-based segmentation networks, we can achieve precise imaging of 3D hepatic veins, facilitating accurate coordinate mapping between CT and the robot. This enables the automatic localization of follow-up targets within the CT image, allowing the robot to navigate precisely to the target's surface. Evaluation of the ultrasound phantom confirms the quality of the US-CT registration and shows the robot reliably locates the targets in repeated trials. The proposed framework holds the potential to significantly reduce time and costs for healthcare providers, clinicians, and follow-up patients, thereby addressing the increasing healthcare burden associated with chronic disease in local communities.