Robotic three dimensional (3D) ultrasound (US) imaging has been employed to overcome the drawback of traditional US examinations, such as high inter-operator variability and lack of repeatability. However, occasionally object movement remains an issue: Unexpected motion decreases the quality of the 3D compounding. Further, attempted adjustment of objects, e.g. adjusting limbs to display the entire limb artery tree, is not allowed for current robotic US system. To address this challenge, we propose a vision-based robotic US system with the ability to monitor the object motion and automatically update the sweep trajectory to provide 3D compounded images of the target anatomy seamlessly. To achieve this, (1) a depth camera is employed to extract the manually planned sweep trajectory, (2) then, the normal direction of the object is estimated using the extracted 3D trajectory, (3) subsequently, to monitor the movement and further compensate this motion to accurately follow the trajectory, the position of firmly attached passive markers are tracked in real-time, and (4) finally, a step-wise compounding is performed. The experiments on a gel phantom demonstrate that the system is able to resume a sweep when the object is not stationary during the scanning.     «

Robotic three dimensional (3D) ultrasound (US) imaging has been employed to overcome the drawback of traditional US examinations, such as high inter-operator variability and lack of repeatability. However, occasionally object movement remains an issue: Unexpected motion decreases the quality of the 3D compounding. Further, attempted adjustment of objects, e.g. adjusting limbs to display the entire limb artery tree, is not allowed for current robotic US system. To address this challenge, we propo...     »