Robot-assisted ultrasound reconstruction for spine surgery: from bench-top to pre-clinical study

Abstract

Robot-assisted ultrasound (rUS) systems have already been used to provide non-radiative three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions that form the basis for guiding spine surgical procedures. Despite promising studies on this technology, there are few studies that offer insight into the robustness and generality Robot-assisted US reconstruction for Spine Surgery of the approach by verifying performance in various testing scenarios. Therefore, this study aims at providing an assessment of a rUS system, with technical details from experiments starting at the bench-top to the pre-clinical study. Methods: A semi-automatic control strategy was proposed to ensure continuous and smooth robotic scanning. Next, a U-Net based segmentation approach was developed to automatically process the anatomic features and derive a high quality 3D US reconstruction. Experiments were conducted on synthetic phantoms and human cadavers to validate the proposed approach. Results: Average deviations of scanning force were found of 2.84 ± 0.45 N on synthetic phantoms and of 5.64 ± 1.10 N on human cadavers. The anatomic features could be reliably reconstructed at mean accuracy of 1.28 ± 0.87 mm for the synthetic phantoms and of 1.74 ± 0.89 mm for the human cadavers. Conclusion:The results and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system in a pre-clinical setting. This work is complementary to previous work, encouraging further exploration of the potential of this technology in in-vivo studies.

Development and evaluation of robot‐assisted ultrasound navigation system for pedicle screw placement: An ex‐vivo animal validation

“…A robotic scanning approach using a hybrid (i.e., position and force) control strategy is performed to acquire US images, as introduced in Ref. 15. The spatial relationships between the different frames are shown in Figure 2.…”

“…The same dataset is also fed to the U‐Net to provide a baseline for comparison. The architecture is described in our previous work 15 . After segmentation, the images are processed with thresholding and a morphological operator.…”

“…17 Subsequently, the segmented 2D US images are reconstructed with the proposed approaches in our previous work. 15 Each pixel c US is represented in the robot base frame {R} by the following equation:…”

“…14 To better serve the PSP procedures, a few studies have investigated the use of intraoperative US navigation for robot-assisted PSP. In previous work, 15 we have developed a robot-assisted US system to reconstruct the 3D spinal anatomy for spine surgery. This paper extends that study to develop a non-radiation robot-assisted US system to provide intraoperative screw trajectories for PSP.…”

Ultrasound-Based Robot-Assisted Drilling for Minimally Invasive Pedicle Screw Placement

“…The employed scanning and reconstruction algorithm is described in previous research [30]. The scanning process is carried out automatically at 4 mm/s using hybrid control while maintaining a constant force of 5 N along the probe 𝒛 𝑢𝑠 -axis.…”