Robot-assisted Breast Ultrasound Scanning Using Geometrical Analysis Of The Seroma And Image Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a robotic ultrasound imaging method that scans the breast in two separate phases to acquire high-quality ultrasound images. Our proposed system controls five Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) of the robot that hold an ultrasound probe to perform precise scanning. This system finds the desired trajectory based on geometrical analysis of the target inside the breast in a pre-scan phase and uses this information to control the probe in a post-scan phase. The proposed method updates the desired values of rotational and translational movement of the probe in the post-scan by calculating the center of mass of segmented target in each acquired frame and the average of image confidence map. The proposed method has been tested experimentally on a plastisol phantom. Given a specific trajectory, the position and orientation of the probe have been controlled at each point of the trajectory. The experiments' result shows us that our proposed visual servoing algorithm successfully controls the probe to look at target tissue and is fast enough for use in a robotic control loop.