Robotic ultrasound-guided facet joint insertion.

Purpose: Facet joint insertion is a common treatment of chronic pain in the back and spine. This procedure is often performed under fluoroscopic guidance, where the staff's repetitive radiation exposure remains an unsolved problem. Robotic ultrasound (rUS) has the potential to reduce or even eliminate the use of radiation by using ultrasound with a robotic-guided needle insertion.

Use the force: deformation correction in robotic 3D ultrasound.

Purpose: Ultrasound acquisitions are typically affected by deformations due to the pressure applied onto the contact surface. While a certain amount of pressure is necessary to ensure good acoustic coupling and visibility of the anatomy under examination, the caused deformations hinder accurate localization and geometric analysis of anatomical structures. These complications have even greater impact in case of 3D ultrasound scans as they limit the correct reconstruction of acquired volumes.

Acoustic window planning for ultrasound acquisition.

Unlabelled: Autonomous robotic ultrasound has recently gained considerable interest, especially for collaborative applications. Existing methods for acquisition trajectory planning are solely based on geometrical considerations, such as the pose of the transducer with respect to the patient surface.

Purpose: This work aims at establishing acoustic window planning to enable autonomous ultrasound acquisitions of anatomies with restricted acoustic windows, such as the liver or the heart.

3D ultrasound registration-based visual servoing for neurosurgical navigation.

Purpose: We present a fully image-based visual servoing framework for neurosurgical navigation and needle guidance. The proposed servo-control scheme allows for compensation of target anatomy movements, maintaining high navigational accuracy over time, and automatic needle guide alignment for accurate manual insertions.

Method: Our system comprises a motorized 3D ultrasound (US) transducer mounted on a robotic arm and equipped with a needle guide.

Towards MRI-Based Autonomous Robotic US Acquisitions: A First Feasibility Study.

Robotic ultrasound has the potential to assist and guide physicians during interventions. In this work, we present a set of methods and a workflow to enable autonomous MRI-guided ultrasound acquisitions. Our approach uses a structured-light 3D scanner for patient-to-robot and image-to-patient calibration, which in turn is used to plan 3D ultrasound trajectories.