Towards Safe and Collaborative Robotic Ultrasound Tissue Scanning in Neurosurgery

Intraoperative ultrasound imaging is used to facilitate safe brain tumour resection. However, due to challenges with image interpretation and the physical scanning, this tool has yet to achieve widespread adoption in neurosurgery. In this paper, we introduce the components and workflow of a novel, versatile robotic platform for intraoperative ultrasound tissue scanning in neurosurgery. An RGB-D camera attached to the robotic arm allows for automatic object localisation with ArUco markers, and 3D surface reconstruction as a triangular mesh using the ImFusion Suite software solution. Impedance controlled guidance of the US probe along arbitrary surfaces, represented as a mesh, enables collaborative US scanning, i.e., autonomous, teleoperated and hands-on guided data acquisition. A preliminary experiment evaluates the suitability of the conceptual workflow and system components for probe landing on a custom-made soft-tissue phantom. Further assessment in future experiments will be necessary to prove the effectiveness of the presented platform.

Automated robotic intraoperative ultrasound for brain surgery

During brain tumour resection, localising cancerous tissue and delineating healthy and pathological borders is challenging, even for experienced neurosurgeons and neuroradiologists. Intraoperative imaging is commonly employed for determining and updating surgical plans in the operating room. Ultrasound (US) has presented itself a suitable tool for this task, owing to its ease of integration into the operating room and surgical procedure. However, widespread establishment of this tool has been limited because of the difficulty of anatomy localisation and data interpretation. In this work, we present a robotic framework designed and tested on a soft-tissue-mimicking brain phantom, simulating intraoperative US (iUS) scanning during brain tumour surgery.

Collaborative Robotic Ultrasound Tissue Scanning for Surgical Resection Guidance in Neurosurgery

The aim of this paper is to introduce a robotic platform for autonomous iUS tissue scanning to optimise intraoperative diagnosis and improve surgical resection during robot-assisted operations. To guide anatomy specific robotic scanning and generate a representation of the robot task space, fast and accurate techniques for the recovery of 3D morphological structures of the surgical cavity are developed. The prototypic DLR MIRO surgical robotic arm is used to control the applied force and the in-plane motion of the US transducer. A key application of the proposed platform is the scanning of brain tissue to guide tumour resection.