Autonomous Robotic System for Carotid Artery Ultrasound Scanning With Visual Servo Navigation

Ultrasound (US) examination is widely used to diagnose carotid artery plaque, which requires the sonographer to guide the probe to scan along a specific path for complete coverage of the carotid artery region. Meanwhile, stable probe-neck interaction is important for high-quality image acquisition. In this study, a robotic system for autonomous carotid US scanning is proposed. To realize the autonomous visual servo movement of the probe, an object tracking method based on improved Siamese network is proposed. Meanwhile, a local quality assessment algorithm is proposed to ensure that carotid ultrasound images are clear and desirable for diagnosis. To address the issue of poor probe-neck contact and loss of carotid object during ultrasound scanning, an automatic recovery control method is proposed to ensure the continuity of the scanning process without the need to stop and restart the scanning. Experimental results show that the robotic system can successfully navigate the probe to move along a path that meets the clinical standard. In addition, the robot can autonomously rediscover the object and return to the normal scanning state if a stuck condition occurs.