Impedance controller and its clinical use of the remote ultrasound diagnostic system

A master-slave type remote ultrasound diagnostic system was developed. This paper presents and evaluates its control strategy. There is only one impedance controller that is located in the master site or the slave site or the relay point in the conventional impedance controller. Therefore, the effect of the time lag in transmitting force and position data becomes large in the conventional system. Then we propose an impedance controller to cope with this problem. In the proposed system, the position controller for the slave manipulator is also constructed by means of a velocity-control-based impedance controller. This feature makes it possible to shorten the dead time taken by the slave manipulator to respond for the contact force input. This paper also reports the result of a clinical use of the remote ultrasound diagnostic system. The result of the experiments demonstrates that a medical doctor can diagnose patients as well as the conventional diagnosis.

[1]  Makoto Kaneko,et al.  Non-Contact Impedance Control for Manipulators , 1997 .

[2]  Takashi Komeda,et al.  Development of the Robot System for Tele-Ultrasound imaging diagnosis , 2002 .

[3]  Wen-Hong Zhu,et al.  Motion/force/image control of a diagnostic ultrasound robot , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[4]  F. Hall,et al.  Ultrasonographic evaluation of the rotator cuff and biceps tendon. , 1986, The Journal of bone and joint surgery. American volume.

[5]  Mamoru Mitsuishi,et al.  Remote ultrasound diagnostic system , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[6]  H. Hashizume,et al.  Ultrasonographic analysis of shoulder rotator cuff tears. , 1999, Acta medica Okayama.

[7]  Susumu Tachi,et al.  Impedance controlled master-slave manipulation system. Part 1. Basic concept and application to the system with a time delay , 1991, Adv. Robotics.

[8]  Mamoru Mitsuishi,et al.  Impedance controller for a remote ultrasound diagnostic system , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[9]  Mamoru Mitsuishi,et al.  Continuous path controller of slave manipulator in remote ultrasound diagnostic system , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[10]  J. Read,et al.  Shoulder ultrasound: diagnostic accuracy for impingement syndrome, rotator cuff tear, and biceps tendon pathology. , 1998, Journal of shoulder and elbow surgery.

[11]  Wen-Hong Zhu,et al.  A user interface for robot-assisted diagnostic ultrasound , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).