Development of compact portable ultrasound robot for home healthcare

Robotic medical ultrasound can support diagnostics and alleviate fatigues. However, state-of-the-art ultrasound devices are too large and complex for home healthcare. Moreover, organs move in accordance with respiration. This movement changes the ultrasound image pattern and it is difficult for the operator to diagnose easily and accurately. To cope with these problems, the authors newly developed a compact portable ultrasound diagnostic robot for home healthcare, which compensate the organ motion. It can support those who find it difficult to visit a hospital for temporal, spatial, or physical reasons. A robust template matching method to servo the target was applied. Specifically, this robot moves to the target, whose position is detected by finding and identifying the image position of the target in the real-time input images. The authors also applied a multi-threading algorithm with two threads to enhance the real-time performance. One is for image processing with template matching. Another is for robot control to servo the target. Experimental results show that their proposed robot and algorithms can be suppressed to 25.2% motion in pk-to-pk for the periodic phantom organ motion (period of 3 s and of pk-to-pk 40 mm).