Research

A Navigation System for Robot Control in Tele Ultrasound Image Diagnosis using CG

If a tele ultrasound diagnosis system is build with a robot for manipulating the probe via a satellite circuit, then the robot control signals, the image sequnce of robot movement and the ultrasound images should be transmitted. Much delay is generated by compressing and decompressing the images except clear transmitting time using conventional tele conference applications or moving picture encoding methods. The delay becomes problem for the robot operation from the remote site. This paper describes, therefore, CG navigated tele ultrasound diagnosis system to aid the remote robot operation. In this system, the operator at the diagnosis site manipulates by seeing CG represented robot without any delay superimposed on the actual scene of the robot movement from the measurement site. As the result of the evaluation experiments, the system could reduce the time necessary for the robot operation as half as seeing only the actual scene of the robot movement. The system, furthermore, was applied to the actual ultrasound diagnosis. The operator could handle the probe and obtain the ultrasound image sequence successfully. This system is expected to be beneficial for the tele ultrasound diagnosis.

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