RSV: Robotic Sonography for Thyroid Volumetry

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zielke, John, Eilers, Christine, Busam, Benjamin, Weber, Wolfgang, Navab, Nassir, Wendler, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Zielke, John
Eilers, Christine
Busam, Benjamin
Weber, Wolfgang
Navab, Nassir
Wendler, Thomas
author_facet Zielke, John
Eilers, Christine
Busam, Benjamin
Weber, Wolfgang
Navab, Nassir
Wendler, Thomas
contents In nuclear medicine, radioiodine therapy is prescribed to treat diseases like hyperthyroidism. The calculation of the prescribed dose depends, amongst other factors, on the thyroid volume. This is currently estimated using conventional 2D ultrasound imaging. However, this modality is inherently user-dependant, resulting in high variability in volume estimations. To increase reproducibility and consistency, we uniquely combine a neural network-based segmentation with an automatic robotic ultrasound scanning for thyroid volumetry. The robotic acquisition is achieved by using a 6 DOF robotic arm with an attached ultrasound probe. Its movement is based on an online segmentation of each thyroid lobe and the appearance of the US image. During post-processing, the US images are segmented to obtain a volume estimation. In an ablation study, we demonstrated the superiority of the motion guidance algorithms for the robot arm movement compared to a naive linear motion, executed by the robot in terms of volumetric accuracy. In a user study on a phantom, we compared conventional 2D ultrasound measurements with our robotic system. The mean volume measurement error of ultrasound expert users could be significantly decreased from 20.85+/-16.10% to only 8.23+/-3.10% compared to the ground truth. This tendency was observed even more in non-expert users where the mean error improvement with the robotic system was measured to be as high as $85\%$ which clearly shows the advantages of the robotic support.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2112_06761
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RSV: Robotic Sonography for Thyroid Volumetry
Zielke, John
Eilers, Christine
Busam, Benjamin
Weber, Wolfgang
Navab, Nassir
Wendler, Thomas
Robotics
In nuclear medicine, radioiodine therapy is prescribed to treat diseases like hyperthyroidism. The calculation of the prescribed dose depends, amongst other factors, on the thyroid volume. This is currently estimated using conventional 2D ultrasound imaging. However, this modality is inherently user-dependant, resulting in high variability in volume estimations. To increase reproducibility and consistency, we uniquely combine a neural network-based segmentation with an automatic robotic ultrasound scanning for thyroid volumetry. The robotic acquisition is achieved by using a 6 DOF robotic arm with an attached ultrasound probe. Its movement is based on an online segmentation of each thyroid lobe and the appearance of the US image. During post-processing, the US images are segmented to obtain a volume estimation. In an ablation study, we demonstrated the superiority of the motion guidance algorithms for the robot arm movement compared to a naive linear motion, executed by the robot in terms of volumetric accuracy. In a user study on a phantom, we compared conventional 2D ultrasound measurements with our robotic system. The mean volume measurement error of ultrasound expert users could be significantly decreased from 20.85+/-16.10% to only 8.23+/-3.10% compared to the ground truth. This tendency was observed even more in non-expert users where the mean error improvement with the robotic system was measured to be as high as $85\%$ which clearly shows the advantages of the robotic support.
title RSV: Robotic Sonography for Thyroid Volumetry
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06761