Image-guided control of a robot for medical ultrasound

The goal of this project is to develop visual servoing for intraoperative robotic ultrasound. The doctor would select a predefined volume from a reference image such as CT or MRI which was obtained before the procedure. Subsequently the robot would image the patient with an ultrasound probe at the predefined volume of interest. This technique would allow the doctor to obtain accurate anatomy of the patient in real-time, even when deformations and organ movement cause the reference image to differ from reality. An ImFusion plugin will be developed which obtains a 3D volume from individual ultrasound probe images, then calculates the 3D transformation between this volume and the volume of interest to move a KUKA iiwa lightweight robot.