Robot-Assisted Ultrasound Could Be A Game Changer

Robots could be instrumental in surgeries of the future. With the help of machines, cardiac surgeons may be able to better plan operations and improve their surgical field view. This can be done with a virtual reality parallel system that operates as a digital twin to the real thing. A properly equipped robot could accurately image a patient through ultrasound.

The advantage of this method is that it does away with issues that are associated with human operators such as hand cramping or radiation exposure. The international research team published their method in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

“Intraoperative ultrasound is especially useful, as it can guide the surgery by providing real-time images of otherwise hidden devices and anatomy,” said paper author Fei-Yue Wang, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

That said the availability of onsite sonographers can be limited, and many procedures requiring intraoperative ultrasound also often require X-ray imaging. As a means to circumvent this problem, Wang and his team developed a platform for robotic intraoperative trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE).

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TEE is an imaging technique widely used to diagnose heart disease and guide cardiac surgical procedures. Wang’s results show that the use of a robot with a simulation platform could potentially improve the general usability of intraoperative ultrasound. This could also be helpful in assisting operators with less experience.

The researchers used parallel control and intelligence to pair an operator and robot in a virtual environment that accurately represented the real thing. This digital platform with the necessary database of ultrasound images and the ability to reconstruct anatomy, helped the robot navigate the target areas for the operator to plan potential surgical corrections in computational experiments.

“Such a system can be used for view definition and optimization to assist pre-planning, as well as algorithm evaluations to facilitate control and navigation in real-time,” Wang said.

The next step for these researchers is to integrate this parallel real/virtual system with specific clinical needs. But Wang says that the ultimate goal is to integrate the virtual system and the physical robot for in-vivo clinical tests. This is to propose a new diagnosis and treatment protocol using parallel intelligence in medical operations.