Robotic Arm Based Automatic Ultrasound Scanning for Three-Dimensional Imaging

This paper presents a human skin inspired automatic robotic ultrasound (US) system for three-dimensional (3-D) imaging. A depth camera was adopted to capture the point cloud of the skin surface. According to the 3-D contour of the skin surface, the scan range and scan path for the US probe could be automatically determined. Then, we used a normal-vector-based method to determine the pose of the robotic arm corresponding to each scan point in the scan path. In addition, two force sensors could feedback the contact force between the scanned tissue and the emission plane of the probe for fine-tuning the pose of the robotic arm. After the scanning, the system could realize 3-D US reconstruction. Experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed system. It is expected that the proposed system will be useful in clinical practices.