Three-Dimensional Ultrasonic Needle Tip Tracking with a Fiber-Optic Ultrasound Receiver

Abstract

Ultrasound is frequently used for guiding minimally invasive procedures, but visualizing medical devices is often challenging with this imaging modality. When visualization is lost, the medical device can cause trauma to critical tissue structures. Here, a method to track the needle tip during ultrasound image-guided procedures is presented. This method involves the use of a fiber-optic ultrasound receiver that is affixed within the cannula of a medical needle to communicate ultrasonically with the external ultrasound probe. This custom probe comprises a central transducer element array and side element arrays. In addition to conventional two-dimensional (2D) B-mode ultrasound imaging provided by the central array, three-dimensional (3D) needle tip tracking is provided by the side arrays. For B-mode ultrasound imaging, a standard transmit-receive sequence with electronic beamforming is performed. For ultrasonic tracking, Golay-coded ultrasound transmissions from the 4 side arrays are received by the hydrophone sensor, and subsequently the received signals are decoded to identify the needle tip's spatial location with respect to the ultrasound imaging probe. As a preliminary validation of this method, insertions of the needle/hydrophone pair were performed in clinically realistic contexts. This novel ultrasound imaging/tracking method is compatible with current clinical workflow, and it provides reliable device tracking during in-plane and out-of-plane needle insertions.

Enhancing photoacoustic visualization of medical devices with elastomeric nanocomposite coatings

“…To overcome this limitation, 3D PA/US imaging could be used. Alternatively, direct visualization could be combined with ultrasonic tracking, where a miniature ultrasound sensor or transmitter is integrated within the cannula of the medical device to actively communicate with the external ultrasound probe, so that the tip of the medical device can be unambiguously identified [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. To further extend the depth from which molecular and functional information of tissue could be obtained with PA imaging, excitation light could be delivered through the medical devices via an embedded optical fiber [4,[16][17][18].…”

Minimally invasive photoacoustic imaging: Current status and future perspectives

“…In this work, in addition to the PA/US sensing of a phantom in front of the probe tip, the fibre-optic US sensor was also used to communicate with an external clinical US array to identify the tip of the probe. This US-based medical device tracking method could be useful in many minimally invasive procedures by accurate identification of the interventional device at sub-millimetre level [160,161,162,163,164]. Although PA sensing is at early stages of development, it allows depth-resolved spectroscopic tissue contrast to be acquired at depths well beyond those for optical spectroscopy methods, and thus it holds the potential to provide intra-operative guidance during surgical and interventional procedures.…”

Neural Network Kalman Filtering for 3-D Object Tracking From Linear Array Ultrasound Data

“…Early approach used speckle information to estimate out-of-plane displacements [12], [13]. Another possibility for instrumented US tracking of needles was proposed by Xia et al [14], [15], who designed a custom-made imaging probe consisting of a central array for conventional imaging and two side arrays for 3-D tracking [15]. Alternatively, one may approach the needle tracking problem in full 3-D to obtain accurate positional estimates [16].…”