Design and experimental evaluations of robot-assisted tele-echography system for remote ultrasound imaging

This paper presents a design of robot-assisted tele-echography system and experiments by using phantom model. The system includes a slave robot, master device, and a pair of hardware codecs. Slave robot was designed to be handheld and lightweight as well as attachable with US probe. Hardware codec was developed for the transmission of US data, robot control data, and audio-visual data in the normal broad internet environment. In the experiments, we chose two master sites physically separated from the slave site with the distances of 120 km and 300 km. In both cases, US images and robot control data were successfully transmitted in real-time. Motion tracking between master device and slave robot was evaluated by optical tracker, the position tracking errors were 1.36 mm in standard deviation and 1.48 mm in average for given master motions. The experiments were conducted for liver phantom model, showing feasibilities of our system to be used in the telemedicine.