O. Zettinig, B. Fuerst, R. Kojcev, M. Esposito, M. Salehi, W. Wein, J. Rackerseder, B. Frisch, N. Navab Toward Real-time 3D Ultrasound Registration-based Visual Servoing for Interventional Navigation IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Stockholm, May 2016. The original publication is available online at ieeexplore.ieee.org (bib)
	While intraoperative imaging is commonly used to guide surgical interventions, automatic robotic support for image-guided navigation has not yet been established in clinical routine. In this paper, we propose a novel visual servoing framework that combines, for the first time, full image-based 3D ultrasound registration with a real-time servo-control scheme. Paired with multi-modal fusion to a pre-interventional plan such as an annotated needle insertion path, it thus allows tracking a target anatomy, continuously updating the plan as the target moves, and keeping a needle guide aligned for accurate manual insertion. The presented system includes a motorized 3D ultrasound transducer mounted on a force-controlled robot and a GPU-based image processing toolkit. The tracking accuracy of our framework is validated on a geometric agar/gelatin phantom using a second robot, achieving positioning errors of on average 0.42+/-0.44 mm. With compounding and registration runtimes of up to total around 550 ms, real-time performance comes into reach. We also present initial results on a spine phantom, demonstrating the feasibility of our system for lumbar spine injections.
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