C. Hennersperger, B. Fuerst, S. Virga, O. Zettinig, B. Frisch, T. Neff, N. Navab Towards MRI-Based Autonomous Robotic US Acquisitions: A First Feasibility Study IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 36, iss. 2, 2017 The original publication (open access) is available online at ieeexplore.ieee.org (bib)
	Robotic ultrasound has the potential to assist and guide physicians during interventions. In this work, we present a set of methods and a workflow to enable autonomous MRI-guided ultrasound acquisitions. Our approach uses a structured-light 3D scanner for patient-to-robot and image-to-patient calibration, which in turn is used to plan 3D ultrasound trajectories. These MRI-based trajectories are followed autonomously by the robot and are further refined online using automatic MRI/US registration. Despite the low spatial resolution of structured light scanners, the initial planned acquisition path can be followed with an accuracy of 2.46±0.96 mm. This leads to a good initialization of the MRI/US registration: the 3D-scan-based alignment for planning and acquisition shows an accuracy (distance between planned ultrasound and MRI) of 4.47 mm, and 0.97 mm after an online-update of the calibration based on a closed loop registration.
	This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each authors copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.