Trial of Probe Position Estimation for Virtual Ultrasonographic Image Display during Vein Puncture using an RGB-D Camera

Abstract

We now have been developing education system for nurses to learn vein puncture using ultrasonography. As a part of the system, we propose two method to estimate position of mockup probe on horizontal plane from single RGB-D camera. One is a method that tracks probe color region robustly using particle filter. The other is a method that searches the best match position between point clouds and given probe contour using ICP algorithm. The experiment that a user imitate probe movement was conducted. The experiment demonstrated that mean of position error on horizontal plane was approximately 1.6 cm using Particle Filter.