A new robot architecture for tele-echography

TLDR

The paper introduces a lightweight cable‑driven slave robot that carries an ultrasound probe for remote echographic examinations and describes its clinical application and experimental validation. The system, named robotic tele‑echography (TER), couples the slave robot with a master console, enabling an expert to remotely acquire and interpret ultrasound data from a patient positioned on the robot’s lightweight, semirigid cable‑driven platform.

Abstract

This paper presents a slave robot carrying an ultrasound probe for remote echographic examination. This robot is integrated in a master-slave system called robotic tele-echography (TER). The system allows an expert operator to perform a remote diagnosis from echographic data he acquires on a patient located in a distant place. The originality of this robot lies in its architecture: the cable-driven robot is lightweight and semirigid, and it is positioned on the patient body. In this paper, we describe the clinical application, the system architecture, the second implementation of the robot, and experiments performed with this prototype.