Towards Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound Scanning Using the Reinforcement Learning-Based Volumetric Data Navigation Method

Ultrasound scanning is an indispensable diagnostic tool in modern medicine, but obtaining an accurate standard plane relies heavily on the sonographer’s skill and expertise. This paper presents a novel approach toward autonomous robotic ultrasound scanning using a reinforcement learning-based navigation method with volumetric ultrasound data. The proposed method enables an ultrasound robot to autonomously acquire high-quality 2D standard planes from patients, thereby reducing the need for human intervention. The core of the approach is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that detects 2D standard planes within the 3D ultrasound volume and guides the ultrasound probe to extract high-quality standard planes. To assess the effectiveness of the 2D standard plane detection method, an evaluation was conducted using a realworld ultrasound dataset, and a comparison was made between its performance and that of other state-of-the-art autonomous approaches. The simulation experiment was also conducted to validate the autonomous robotic ultrasound acquisition workflow. Results demonstrate that the reinforcement learning-based volumetric data navigation method outperforms existing techniques in terms of standard plane accuracy and is very effective for volumetric data-based robotic navigation.