Real-time 3D ultrasound-based servoing of a surgical instrument

This paper presents a real-time 3D ultrasoundguided robotic system, designed to autonomously navigate a surgical instrument to surgeon-specified target points. The system tracks the instrument in real-time (2 Hz) using image processing. Thus, it does not require tracking of the ultrasound scan head. It makes use of a line detection algorithm and a passive instrument marker, which together report the instrument's position and orientation (6 d.o.f.) from a single ultrasound image. Validation experiments are presented. The system controlled instrument position in a variety of image locations with a mean error of 0.8 mm