Robot-Assisted Multiview Fusion of Three-Dimensional Echocardiography: A Phantom Study

Abstract

Echocardiography is one of the most widely used imaging options for diagnosing cardiac diseases. It is inexpensive, portable, and free of ionizing radiation. Despite these advantages, echocardiography has a few limitations, including a limited field of view. One option to overcome these limitations is to scan the heart from different locations and fuse them. However, this approach requires image registration or tracking of the ultrasound transducer’s positions during scanning. Image registration algorithms typically rely on the image features available in images, and their accuracy heavily relies on image quality. Alternatively, previous external tracker-based methods attempted to solve the problem using optical and electromagnetic trackers. In this study, we propose a robot arm to follow the ultrasound transducer and perform a fusion of multiple scans. The proposed approach does not suffer from the requirement of the line of sight between the markers and cameras as in the case of the previous optical tracking-based methods. In this pilot study using a heart phantom, we show that the fusion of multiple echocardiography scans could be achieved using a robotic arm. In addition to solving the field-of-view limitation, the robotic arm-based systems could also lead to a reduction in sonographer strain when operated remotely or autonomously.