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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Biomedical Robotics
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1474077
This article is part of the Research Topic Medical Cybernics View all 4 articles

On the Feasibility of A Robotic Probe Manipulator for Echocardiography in the Prone Position

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
  • 2 Sumatra Institute of Technology, Lampung Selatan, Indonesia
  • 3 University of Tsukuba Hospital, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Word counts: 6075. Number of figures: 9. Number of tables: 1. Robotic probe manipulator for echocardography (echo) can potentially reduce cardiac radiologists' physical burden. Echo procedure with industrial robots has wide Range of Motion (RoM) but poses safety risks because the robot may clamp the patient against the bed. Conversely, a soft robotic manipulator for echo has safe contact force but suffers from a limited RoM. Due to COVID-19, cardiac radiologists explored performing echo in the prone-positioned patients, which yielded good-quality images but was difficult to perform manually. From robot design perspective, prone position allows safer robot without clamping issue because all actuators are under the patient with minimal RoM to reach the cardiac windows. In this work, we propose a robotic probe manipulator for echo in the prone position employing a combination of a delta 3D printer and a soft end-effector and investigate its feasibility in a clinical setting. We implemented the robot as a scanner type device in which the probe manipulator scans from under a bed with an opening around the chest area.The doctor controls the robot with a joystick and a keypad while looking at a camera view of the chest area and the ultrasound display as feedback. For the experiments, three doctors and three medical students scanned the parasternal window of the same healthy subject with the robot and then manually. Two expert cardiologists evaluated the captured ultrasound images. All medical personnel could obtain all the required views with the robot, but the scanning time was considerably longer than the manual one. The ultrasound image quality scores of the doctors' group remained constant between manual and robotic scans. However, the image scores of the robotic scan were lower in the students' group. In summary, this work verified the ability to obtain clinically sufficient images in echocardiography in the prone position by expert medical doctors using the proposed robotic probe manipulator. Our robot can be further developed with semi automatic procedure to serve as a platform for safe and ergonomic echocardiography.

    Keywords: Soft robotic, Medical Robotic, robotic ultrasound, Prone Position, Echocardiography

    Received: 01 Aug 2024; Accepted: 31 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Gifari, Machino, Machino, Hassan and Suzuki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Muhammad W. Gifari, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.