Automatic Guidance of a Surgical Instrument with Ultrasound Based Visual Servoing

Visual servoing is a possible solution to assist the surgeon in performing tasks under ultrasound (US) imaging. To this aim, a system was developed that allows the surgeon to select a desired instrument location on a US image. Then a robot is programmed to automatically move the instrument towards the selected location. This approach requires robust tracking of the instrument in the US image, together with modeling of the overall system and implementation of a visual servoing loop. This paper presents geometrical and kinematic models of the system, as well as the control loop design, which is validated through both numerical simulations, and results of in vitro experiments.