Towards Autonomous Atlas-Based Ultrasound Acquisitions in Presence of Articulated Motion

Robotic ultrasound (US) imaging aims at overcoming some of the limitations of free-hand US examinations, e.g. difficulty in guaranteeing intra- and inter-operator repeatability. However, due to anatomical and physiological variations between patients and relative movement of anatomical substructures, it is challenging to robustly generate optimal trajectories to examine the anatomies of interest, in particular, when they comprise articulated joints. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a vision-based approach allowing autonomous robotic US limb scanning. To this end, an atlas MRI template of a human arm with annotated vascular structures is used to generate trajectories and register and project them onto patients’ skin surfaces for robotic US acquisition. To effectively segment and accurately reconstruct the targeted 3D vessel, we make use of spatial continuity in consecutive US frames by incorporating channel attention modules into a U-Net-type neural network. The automatic trajectory generation method is evaluated on six volunteers with various articulated joint angles. In all cases, the system can successfully acquire the planned vascular structure on volunteers’ limbs. For one volunteer the MRI scan was also available, which allows the evaluation of the average radius of the scanned artery from US images, resulting in a radius estimation ($\text{1.2} \pm \text{0.05 mm}$) comparable to the MRI ground truth ($\text{1.2} \pm \text{0.04 mm}$).

I. Introduction

Ultrasound (US) imaging has become one of the standard medical imaging modalities and is widely used for diagnosis and interventional objectives. US modality is powerful and effective for identifying internal lesions and organ abnormalities, particularly considering that it is non-invasive, real-time, and radiation-free. The absence of contraindications and the potential of US imaging in vascular diagnosis suggest that it may become the main diagnostic tool to examine the extremity artery tree [1]. Particularly, US imaging is the only technique that can provide information on the degree of calcification [1].