Implementation of an automatic scanning and detection algorithm for the carotid artery by an assisted-robotic measurement system

In this paper, we present a robotic system which automatically searches and detects the longitudinal section of the carotid artery using a conventional medical ultrasound diagnostic system. In order to obtain a clear image of the carotid artery ready for medical diagnosis, the authors developed real-time image processing algorithms to detect the carotid artery and tissue layers of its walls in the B-mode ultrasound images. Sequential patterns of the ultrasound probe trajectory for scanning the surface of the neck and searching the carotid, were implemented and tested on the Waseda-Tokyo Women's Medical-Aloka Blood Flow Measurement Robot System No. 1 Refined II (WTA-1RII). An experiment with eleven volunteers was carried out and the results show that the system obtained clear images of the carotid artery in 91% of the trials.

[1]  Etienne Dombre,et al.  Hippocrate: a safe robot arm for medical applications with force feedback , 1999, Medical Image Anal..

[2]  Tomas Gustavsson,et al.  A multiscale dynamic programming procedure for boundary detection in ultrasonic artery images , 2000, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[3]  M. Sugawara,et al.  Development of a non-invasive real-time measurement system of wave intensity , 2000, 2000 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium. Proceedings. An International Symposium (Cat. No.00CH37121).

[4]  Antonio Pietrosanto,et al.  An automatic measurement system for the evaluation of carotid intima-media thickness , 2001, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[5]  Wen-Hong Zhu,et al.  Image-guided control of a robot for medical ultrasound , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[6]  Philippe Cinquin,et al.  A new robot architecture for tele-echography , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[7]  Christophe Rosenberger,et al.  A tele-operated mobile ultrasound scanner using a light-weight robot , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[8]  S. Delsanto,et al.  CULEX-Completely User-independent Layers EXtraction: Ultrasonic Carotid Artery Images Segmentation , 2005, 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference.

[9]  Christos P. Loizou,et al.  Snakes based segmentation of the common carotid artery intima media , 2007, Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing.

[10]  Gregory D. Hager,et al.  Full Motion Tracking in Ultrasound Using Image Speckle Information and Visual Servoing , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[11]  Takashi Okada,et al.  Clinical usefulness of wave intensity analysis , 2009, Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing.

[12]  Mamoru Mitsuishi,et al.  Construction Methodology for a Remote Ultrasound Diagnostic System , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[13]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Development of assisted-robotic system designed to measure the Wave Intensity with an ultrasonic diagnostic device , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  Jean Meunier,et al.  Segmentation in Ultrasonic B-Mode Images of Healthy Carotid Arteries Using Mixtures of Nakagami Distributions and Stochastic Optimization , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.