A three-dimensional quasi-static ultrasound strain imaging system using a 6-DoF robotic arm

Three-dimensional ultrasonic elastic imaging is a new medical imaging technology, which aims to obtain the elastic information of human tissues and detect pathological tissues. This paper presents a 3D quasi-static ultrasound strain imaging system using a 6-DoF robotic arm. We use the robotic arm, which has 6-DoF, to control an ultrasound probe to acquire pre-deformed and post-deformed radio frequency (RF) image frames. We use a Kinect to obtain point clouds information on the surface of tissues. Then, according to the three-dimensional contour of marker pasted in the tissue, the scanning region and path can be automatically determined. Then a method based on the method vector is used to determine the attitude of the robot arm so that the probe can be perpendicular to the plane of the scanned tissues. The result of phantom and human experiments shows that the system we proposed can create high-quality 3D quasi-static ultrasound strain images. It is expected that the system we proposed has great prospects for clinical application.