Invisible Needle Detection in Ultrasound: Leveraging Mechanism-Induced Vibration

In clinical applications that involve ultrasound-guided intervention, the visibility of the needle can be severely impeded due to steep insertion and strong distractors such as speckle noise and anatomical occlusion. To address this challenge, we propose VibNet, a learning-based framework tailored to enhance the robustness and accuracy of needle detection in ultrasound images, even when the target becomes invisible to the naked eye. Inspired by Eulerian Video Magnification techniques, we utilize an external step motor to induce low-amplitude periodic motion on the needle. These subtle vibrations offer the potential to generate robust frequency features for detecting the motion patterns around the needle. To robustly and precisely detect the needle leveraging these vibrations, VibNet integrates learning-based Short-Time-Fourier-Transform and Hough-Transform modules to achieve successive sub-goals, including motion feature extraction in the spatiotemporal space, frequency feature aggregation, and needle detection in the Hough space. Based on the results obtained on distinct ex vivo porcine and bovine tissue samples, the proposed algorithm exhibits superior detection performance with efficient computation and generalization capability.

Robot-Assisted Deep Venous Thrombosis Ultrasound Examination using Virtual Fixture

Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) is a common vascular disease with blood clots inside deep veins, which may block blood flow or even cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. A typical exam for DVT using ultrasound (US) imaging is by pressing the target vein until its lumen is fully compressed. However, the compression exam is highly operator-dependent. To alleviate intra- and inter-variations, we present a robotic US system with a novel hybrid force motion control scheme ensuring position and force tracking accuracy, and soft landing of the probe onto the target surface. In addition, a path-based virtual fixture is proposed to realize easy human-robot interaction for repeat compression operation at the lesion location. To ensure the biometric measurements obtained in different examinations are comparable, the 6D scanning path is determined in a coarse-to-fine manner using both an external RGBD camera and US images. The RGBD camera is first used to extract a rough scanning path on the object. Then, the segmented vascular lumen from US images are used to optimize the scanning path to ensure the visibility of the target object. To generate a continuous scan path for developing virtual fixtures, an arc-length based path fitting model considering both position and orientation is proposed. Finally, the whole system is evaluated on a human-like arm phantom with an uneven surface.

Machine Learning in Robotic Ultrasound Imaging: Challenges and Perspectives

This article reviews the recent advances in intelligent robotic ultrasound (US) imaging systems. We commence by presenting the commonly employed robotic mechanisms and control techniques in robotic US imaging, along with their clinical applications. Subsequently, we focus on the deployment of machine learning techniques in the development of robotic sonographers, emphasizing crucial developments aimed at enhancing the intelligence of these systems. The methods for achieving autonomous action reasoning are categorized into two sets of approaches: those relying on implicit environmental data interpretation and those using explicit interpretation. Throughout this exploration, we also discuss practical challenges, including those related to the scarcity of medical data, the need for a deeper understanding of the physical aspects involved, and effective data representation approaches. Moreover, we conclude by highlighting the open problems in the field and analyzing different possible perspectives on how the community could move forward in this research area.

SG-Bot: Object Rearrangement via Coarse-to-Fine Robotic Imagination on Scene Graphs

Object rearrangement is pivotal in robotic-environment interactions, representing a significant capability in embodied AI. In this paper, we present SG-Bot, a novel rearrangement framework that utilizes a coarse-to-fine scheme with a scene graph as the scene representation. Unlike previous methods that rely on either known goal priors or zero-shot large models, SG-Bot exemplifies lightweight, real-time, and user-controllable characteristics, seamlessly blending the consideration of commonsense knowledge with automatic generation capabilities. SG-Bot employs a three-fold procedure--observation, imagination, and execution--to adeptly address the task. Initially, objects are discerned and extracted from a cluttered scene during the observation. These objects are first coarsely organized and depicted within a scene graph, guided by either commonsense or user-defined criteria. Then, this scene graph subsequently informs a generative model, which forms a fine-grained goal scene considering the shape information from the initial scene and object semantics. Finally, for execution, the initial and envisioned goal scenes are matched to formulate robotic action policies. Experimental results demonstrate that SG-Bot outperforms competitors by a large margin.

Motion Magnification in Robotic Sonography: Enabling Pulsation-Aware Artery Segmentation

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for diagnosing and monitoring arterial diseases, mainly due to the advantages of being non-invasive, radiation-free, and real-time. In order to provide additional information to assist clinicians in diagnosis, the tubular structures are often segmented from US images. To improve the artery segmentation accuracy and stability during scans, this work presents a novel pulsation-assisted segmentation neural network (PAS-NN) by explicitly taking advantage of the cardiac-induced motions. Motion magnification techniques are employed to amplify the subtle motion within the frequency band of interest to extract the pulsation signals from sequential US images. The extracted real-time pulsation information can help to locate the arteries on cross-section US images; therefore, we explicitly integrated the pulsation into the proposed PAS-NN as attention guidance. Notably, a robotic arm is necessary to provide stable movement during US imaging since magnifying the target motions from the US images captured along a scan path is not manually feasible due to the hand tremor. To validate the proposed robotic US system for imaging arteries, experiments are carried out on volunteers' carotid and radial arteries. The results demonstrated that the PAS-NN could achieve comparable results as state-of-the-art on carotid and can effectively improve the segmentation performance for small vessels (radial artery).

MonoGraspNet: 6-DoF Grasping with a Single RGB Image

6-DoF robotic grasping is a long-lasting but unsolved problem. Recent methods utilize strong 3D networks to extract geometric grasping representations from depth sensors, demonstrating superior accuracy on common objects but perform unsatisfactorily on photometrically challenging objects, e.g., objects in transparent or reflective materials. The bottleneck lies in that the surface of these objects can not reflect back accurate depth due to the absorption or refraction of light. In this paper, in contrast to exploiting the inaccurate depth data, we propose the first RGB-only 6-DoF grasping pipeline called MonoGraspNet that utilizes stable 2D features to simultaneously handle arbitrary object grasping and overcome the problems induced by photometrically challenging objects. MonoGraspNet leverages keypoint heatmap and normal map to recover the 6-DoF grasping poses represented by our novel representation parameterized with 2D keypoints with corresponding depth, grasping direction, grasping width, and angle. Extensive experiments in real scenes demonstrate that our method can achieve competitive results in grasping common objects and surpass the depth-based competitor by a large margin in grasping photometrically challenging objects. To further stimulate robotic manipulation research, we additionally annotate and open-source a multi-view and multi-scene real-world grasping dataset, containing 120 objects of mixed photometric complexity with 20M accurate grasping labels.