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Robot-assisted ultrasound reconstruction for spine surgery: from bench-top to pre-clinical study

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Robot-assisted ultrasound (rUS) systems have already been used to provide non-radiative three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions that form the basis for guiding spine surgical procedures. Despite promising studies on this technology, there are few studies that offer insight into the robustness and generality of the approach by verifying performance in various testing scenarios. Therefore, this study aims at providing an assessment of a rUS system, with technical details from experiments starting at the bench-top to the pre-clinical study.

Methods

A semi-automatic control strategy was proposed to ensure continuous and smooth robotic scanning. Next, a U-Net-based segmentation approach was developed to automatically process the anatomic features and derive a high-quality 3D US reconstruction. Experiments were conducted on synthetic phantoms and human cadavers to validate the proposed approach.

Results

Average deviations of scanning force were found to be 2.84±0.45 N on synthetic phantoms and to be 5.64±1.10 N on human cadavers. The anatomic features could be reliably reconstructed at mean accuracy of 1.28±0.87 mm for the synthetic phantoms and of 1.74±0.89 mm for the human cadavers.

Conclusion

The results and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system in a pre-clinical setting. This work is complementary to previous work, encouraging further exploration of the potential of this technology in in vivo studies.

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Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 101016985 (FAROS) and Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) under grant agreement no. G0A1420N (Radar-spine) and no. 1S36322N (Harmony).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robot-Assisted Surgery group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Ruixuan Li, Ayoob Davoodi, Yuyu Cai, Gianni Borghesan & Emmanuel Vander Poorten

  2. Robotics and Mechatronics, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Kenan Niu

  3. Core Lab ROB, Flanders Make, Leuven, Belgium

    Gianni Borghesan

  4. Research in Orthopedic Computer Science, University Hospital Balgrist, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Nicola Cavalcanti, Aidana Massalimova, Fabio Carrillo & Philipp Fürnstahl

  5. University Spine Center Zurich, University Hospital Balgrist, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christoph J. Laux & Mazda Farshad

Authors
  1. Ruixuan Li
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  2. Ayoob Davoodi
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  3. Yuyu Cai
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ruixuan Li.

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Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

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Ethical approval BASEC no. 202101196 was granted by the Cantonal Ethical Committee of the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland.

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This study does not involve human participants.

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Li, R., Davoodi, A., Cai, Y. et al. Robot-assisted ultrasound reconstruction for spine surgery: from bench-top to pre-clinical study. Int J CARS 18, 1613–1623 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-023-02932-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-023-02932-z

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