Biplane Transrectal Ultrasound Probe Calibration using Dual-arm Robotic System with Multi-DOF End-effectors

Transrectal Ultrasound (TRUS)-guided dual-arm robotic needle insertion system has improved clinical diagnosis treatment for biopsy and brachytherapy. It provides a highly precise and flexible method for inserting surgical needles. In the existing system, both the probe and needle are fixed to the robot’s end flange, which prevents the rotation and translation of the TRUS probe and needle from enabling multi-angle scanning and flexible needle insertion. In our previous work, we developed a dual-arm robotic needle insertion system with multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) end-effectors to address the aforementioned issues. The calibration accuracy of the system directly determines the system’s effectiveness. However, existing calibration schemes are challenging to complete the calibration of the dual-arm robotic needle insertion system with multi-DOF end-effectors. Therefore, this paper presents a biplane TRUS probe calibration using dual-arm robotic needle insertion system with multi-DOF end-effectors. In the proposed approach, the kinematic of the multi-DOF probe and needle are first modeled to obtain the calibration parameters. Then the multi-DOF needle and probe are calibrated as the biplane TRUS image, which can be used to track the different motion states of the probe and needle. Finally, the experimental results are obtained and validated on the TRUS-guided dual-arm robotic needle insertion system. The results showed that the calibration accuracy of the overall system is 0.80±0.23 mm, which meets the clinical requirements.