Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound for Thyroid Imaging
Jakub Kaminski
This project concerned a serial robotic arm autonomously acquiring 3D thyroid ultrasound images. The system uses 3D vision to match a template motion plan to the observed anatomy and then it captures the ultrasound data while executing the motion plan. A PD force controller is used to maintain probe-surface contact force. The system detects a 3D boundary of thyroid and aligns together 3D ultrasound scans from subsequent imaging acquisitions. The scope of my work included:
- Participation in a 14-hour-long thyroid ultrasound imaging course
- Designing robot end-effector and implementing 2 methods for force
- sensing (external force sensor and robot-based force sensing)
- Developing ultrasound images acquisition pipeline with the Verasonics Vantage 128 research system
- Creating Verasonics-ROS communication pipeline for retrieving live 2D ultrasound frames
- Pointcloud data acquisition and processing
- Generating robot trajectories
- Implementing ROS Control and force control
- 3D data visualization using MATLAB
- Imaging reproducibility assessment using cross-correlation between the corresponding frames for a phantom positioned in different poses