Active Needle Tracking with Wearable 2-DOF Ultrasound Scanner for Lumbar Puncture Guidance

Lumbar punctures can be challenging for patients with obesity, pregnancy or spine-malformation, due to the inability to bend the back and open up the interspinous gap for needle access. Therefore, we are proposing a new wearable device-based solution to provide in-situ ultrasound guidance for helping the clinician with lumbar puncture. In this work, we developed a method to allow real-time tracking of the needle using the 2-DOF ultrasound imaging plane provided by our wearable ultrasound scanner. A constrained optimization framework is set up to solve for the minimum sweeping motion capturing the full needle shaft. Both simulation and physical experiment were conducted and results show that the average tip localization error is 1.53 mm given 1000 simulation runs, and 92.42% of the needle shaft is visualized on average during 15 physical experiment trials.