Controlling The Robot Assisting Ultrasound Scanning Remotely And The Design And Implementation Of Three-dimensional Imaging System

With the development of medical technology in recent years, medical ultrasound diagnosis has become an indispensable part of clinical diagnosis. Ultrasound imaging has prominent advantages of its non-trauma, non-radiation, low cost and convenience. However, medical ultrasound diagnosis highly dependents on doctors’ experience. In order to obtain ultrasound image at high resolution, it is important for doctors to hold the probe in appropriate position and direction. In addition, doctors need to hold the probe for a long time in ultrasound diagnosis, which leads to musculoskeletal disease easily[5], according to the research. To overcome the disadvantages of ultrasound scanning in doctors’ clinical diagnosis, many researchers abroad have applied robotic systems to ultrasound scanning. Robotic control systems have the advantages of high precision, strong operability, and high dexterity. When applied into ultrasound scanning, it can increase the efficiency of the ultrasound diagnosis, and help to relieve patients’ burden. Robotic control can also overcome the influence from clinical diagnosis such as doctors’ inattention, fatigue, and trembling, which will result in blurred image, so as to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. The two-dimensional ultrasound image can only show a cross section of diagnosis clinically, doctors can only judge the whole form of human tissues according to their experience, which affects the objectivity of the diagnosis. By means of three-dimensional ultrasound imaging technology, it is feasible to show the 3D structure of the tissue intuitively, so that doctors can understand the spatial information and anatomical structure of the region of interest(ROI) to get more accurate result.The paper proposes a three-dimensional imaging system based on controlling the robot assisting ultrasound scanning remotely. The whole system consists of four parts: video transmission module, robotic controlling module, ultrasound image transmission module and 3D reconstruction module. We save the position and direction of a series of two-dimensional images and the image data obtained by remote access according to a certain format. After scanning, we make use of the Bessel interpolation algorithm to interpolate. Then we achieve the fast 3D reconstruction of phantom and tissue. Applying the remote controlled robot into ultrasound scanning can solve the problem that patients can’t see a doctor immediately because of the traditional uneven distribution of medical resources, on one hand, and can overcome the disadvantages that the robotic ultrasound systems abroad just apply two-dimensional ultrasound image on medical diagnosis, on the other hand.In order to prove the feasibility and rationality of our system, we do experiments on resolution phantom for quantitative analysis, and make statistics of 15 results. The true value of the length of large cylinder, the diameter of large cylinder, and the distance between adjoining small cylinders is 18 millimeter, 12 millimeter, and 12.5 millimeter respectively. Their measurements are within 18.92±0.39, 12.02±0.38, and 12.995±0.215 respectively. We also conduct the experiments on thyroid gland, lumbar spine, breast, fetus phantom and body’s tissue such as arm and calf for qualitative analysis. Through the experiments above, we can reconstruct the 3D image of the tissue successfully, which proves our system has a certain practical value.