A robust ultrasound-based visual servoing approach for automatic guidance of a surgical instrument with in vivo experiments

Abstract

This paper presents a visual servoing approach for automatic guidance of an instrument. In this approach, the visual sensor is an ultrasound probe that observes an instrument inserted inside the beating heart of a patient and manipulated by a robot. Following the preliminary results presented, the present paper provides a new parameterization of the visual feature signal that allows for enhanced robustness, and shows the first in vivo results on this ongoing research