A multi-plane approach for ultrasound visual servoing: Application to a registration task

This paper presents a new image-based approach to control a robotic system equipped with an ultrasound imaging device. Moments based image features are extracted from three orthogonal ultrasound images to servo in-plane and out-of-plane motions of the system. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach improves upon techniques based on a single 2D US image in term of probe positioning. The second contribution of this paper is to use this method to perform a multimodal registration task by formulating it as a virtual visual servoing problem. Multimodal registration experiments performed with an ultrasound phantom containing an egg-shaped object provide a first experimental validation of the proposed method.