Learning Robotic Ultrasound Skills from Human Demonstrations

Robotic ultrasound system plays a vital role in assisting or even replacing sonographers in some cases. However, modeling and learning ultrasound skills from professional sonographers are still challenging tasks that hinder the development of ultrasound systems’ autonomy. To solve these problems, we propose a learning-based framework to acquire ultrasound scanning skills from human demonstrations1. First, ultrasound scanning skills are encapsulated into a high-dimensional multi-modal model, which takes ultrasound images, probe pose, and contact force into account. The model’s parameters can be learned from clinical ultrasound data demonstrated by professional sonographers. Second, the target function of autonomous ultrasound examinations is proposed, which can be solved roughly by the sampling-based strategy. The sonographers’ ultrasound skills can be represented by approximating the limit of the target function. Finally, the robustness of the proposed framework is validated with the experiments on ground-true data from sonographers.