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

• DOI: 10.1007/s11548-023-02932-z
• Publication Date: 2023-05-12T11:02:31Z
• Authors: Ruixuan Li; Ayoob Davoodi; Yuyu Cai; Kenan Niu; Gianni Borghesan; Nicola Cavalcanti; Aidana Massalimova; Fabio Carrillo; Christoph J. Laux; Mazda Farshad; Philipp Fürnstahl; Emmanuel Vander P...
• Keywords: 1707 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Phantoms, Imaging; 2204 Biomedical Engineering; 610 Medicine & health; Robotics; 1704 Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design; Ultrasound guidance; Spine; 2746 Surgery; Spine surgery; Imaging, Three-Dimensional; 2023 OA procedure; 1706 Computer Science Applications; 2741 Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging; Humans; 10046 Balgrist University Hospital, Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Center; Flanders Make at KU Leuven; 3D reconstruction; Robot-assisted system; 2718 Health Informatics; Ultrasonography

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 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.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.Average deviations of scanning force were found to be 2.84±0.45 N on synthetic phantoms and to be 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.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.