Section: Software

Development work: Medical robotics platforms

Participants : Fabien Spindler, Alexandre Krupa.

To validate our researches in medical robotics, we exploit since 2004 a six degrees of freedom Hippocrate medical arm designed by the Sinters company (see Fig. 2 .c). A force torque sensor is mounted on the end-effector holding an ultrasound probe connected to a SonoSite 180 Plus imaging system. A PC running Linux is used for image processing and for controlling the low level controller under QNX via a LAN network. This material is shared betweeen the Lagadic and Visages teams.

In order to improve visual servoing techniques using ultrasound images, a next step is to take into account physiological motion of organs, for example deformations due to the breathing. Therefore it is essential to first simulate and control this motion that is considered as a pertubation by using an experimental setup providing ground truth. As part of this new setup, a new Adept Viper S850 arm was installed in September (see Fig. 2 .d). New software developments were done to interface this robot in our visual servoing platform ViSP (see Section  5.1 ). It will allow applying a periodical rigid motion to an artifical soft tissue phantom. This new robot will also be used to validate experimentally the research done in the ANR Prosit project (see Section  8.2.6 ) before the transfer to the project partners.

As described in Section  6.2.1 , visual servoing methods using ultrasound images have been improved. The platform was used to validate the automatic positioning of a 2D US probe in order to reach a desired B-scan image of an object of interest. It was also used to extend and validate the motion tracking approach using ultrasound speckle [19] .