1A1-A18 Development of a Robotic Carotid Blood Flow Measurement System

Abstract

We developed a robot system for the conventional measurement of the carotid blood flow using an ultrasonic diagnostic equipment, aiming at reduction of the patient and doctor burden. The authors developed a probe manipulator consisted of 6-DOF linear parallel link mechanism and a 6-DOF passive positioning arm for adjusting the probe manipulator. This positioning arm consists serial link and parallel link. This manipulator operation adopted two method, direct input by virtual compliance control and remote control by external input device. Furthermore, we constructed an image processing algorithm to detect tunica intima and a probe control algorithm for searching the best section automatically in a long axis measurement.