Multi-plane ultrasound visual servoing : application to a registration task

Context

We develop a moments based approach to control the six degrees of freedom of an ultrasound probe. To allow a global convergence of the probe positioning, even in the case of roughly symmetric objects of interest, we propose to consider a multi-plane US probe. This probe provides three 2D US images according to three orthogonal planes rigidly linked together. We define the optimal 2D features that can be extracted from these three planes and model the corresponding interaction matrix to control the six DOF of the system.

Experimental results:

Image-to-image registration techniques are useful in medical field to transfer information from preoperative data to an intraoperative image. The aim is to compute the homogeneous transformation that transforms the coordinates of a pixel in the US intraoperative image frame into voxel position expressed in the preoperative volume frame. Usual registration algorithms use an initialization of the parameters of this transformation based on artificial or anatomical landmarks identified in the preoperative 3D image and in a set of intraoperative US images. These parameters are then iteratively altered to optimize a similarity measure between both data sets according to a Powell-Brent search method. In our approach we propose to solve the registration task thanks to the visual servoing approach applied to a virtual multi-plane probe interacting with the preoperative volume. known.

References

1. C. Nadeau, A. Krupa. A multi-plane approach for ultrasound visual servoing: application to a registration task. In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS'10, Pages 5706-5711, Taipei, Taiwan, October 2010.