Ultrasound-Guided Robotic Autonomous Operation Based on Real-Time Deformation Tracking and Prediction

Robotic ultrasound (US)-guided surgery is one of the most common clinical workflows for many diseases. Intraoperative tissue deformation is a key challenge faced by robots in realizing autonomous surgery. This study develops a US-guided robotic autonomous operation scheme based on deformation tracking and prediction, which can overcome the adverse effects of intraoperative deformation. First, a deformation tracking method based on real-time nonrigid image registration is proposed to track tissue and path deformation in real time. Simultaneously, we propose a deformation prediction model that is updated by the forgetting factor recursive least squares for predicting the next deformation according to historical tracked data. Then, a time-varying vector field navigation law is incorporated to guide the robot following the dynamically deformed surgical path, therefore compensating for deformation. To verify the performance of the proposed method, a dual-arm robotic US surgical navigation system prototype is constructed, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in vitro</i> experiments in a deformable environment are conducted. The results demonstrated that our method can guide the robot to compensate for tissue deformation in real-time with a dynamic path following error within 1 mm.