Robot guidance of an ultrasound probe toward a 3D region of interest detected through X-ray mammography.

Purpose: This research is situated in the context of breast cancer detection where the standard procedure is the succession of an initial mammography (MX) examination and a supplementary ultrasound (US) scan. One major difficulty of this procedure results from the fact that breast geometry changes between both examinations due to different patient's positions. The proposed system facilitates this combined examination by keeping the breast geometry and by adding a US probe guidance robot to the mammography system.

Underactuated comanipulation for ultrasound breast exams.

We investigate the possibility of providing adequate task assistance using under-actuated robots for human-robot tool co-manipulation. This novel approach optimizes robot-user synergy without taking into account any a priori knowledge of parameters depending on the user. Six different actuation modes were compared for a localization and scanning task.