Towards Autonomous Cardiac Ultrasound Scanning: Combining Physician Expertise and Machine Intelligence

Echocardiography serves as a prevalent modality for both heart disease diagnosis and procedural guidance in medical applications. Nevertheless, the conventional echocardiography examination heavily relies on the manual dexterity of the sonographer, leading to the suboptimal repeatability. Despite the extensive exploration of robot-assisted ultrasound systems, achieving a heightened level of automation in examinations and enhancing the practicality of these robotic platforms for primary utilization remain formidable challenges within the field. In this study, we introduce an innovative automatic acquisition method for cardiac views using a novel ultrasound robot. The method is designed to autonomously traverse and scan target positions and angular ranges to search and identify the target cardiac views. First, the target positions and angular ranges were derived from a professional sonographer’s practice on 14 cases. Then, an automatic traversal scanning method is designed integrating visual guidance, human-machine collaboration, and path planning within the framework of a novel parallel mechanism-based ultrasound robot. Finally, we explore deep metric learning to search for target ultrasound images in the traversed ultrasound video. Experiments on the test set to evaluate the target ultrasound view searching algorithm achieved a mAP of 98.8% and a Rank-1 accuracy of 98.23%. Our method has been successfully validated by data from five subjects, achieving the acquisition of standard parasternal long-axis and short-axis cardiac views essential for diagnosis, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.