超音波診断支援ロボットによる協調プローブ操作における負荷軽減評価

抄録

Among the many diagnostic imaging methods, ultrasound has become indispensable in the medical field due to its advantages such as minimally invasive, small size, and low cost. However, it is well known that ultrasound diagnosis requires specialized knowledge and experience of the examiner, and that holding the probe during diagnosis is a heavy burden on the examiner. Therefore, it is desirable to have a system in which a robot can scan probes in place of an inspector or teach scanning procedures to inexperienced inspectors. In this paper, we have developed an ultrasound probe grasping mechanism with the aim of constructing a system for ultrasound diagnosis in which humans and robots cooperate. Next, we proposed the cooperative voluntary contraction(CVC) as an index to show the load during the cooperative motion, and confirmed the relationship between the control parameters and the percentage of the cooperative voluntary contraction(%CVC) when the robot is driven in the force control mode by experiments.As a result, we found that the relationship between control parameters and %CVC changes depending on various conditions such as the inspector and the robot’s installation position.