グリッド状ワイヤを備えた音響カプラーによる超音波探触子姿勢検出

抄録

An image quality of a medical US (ultrasound) is operator dependent because a manipulation of an US probe requires skill. To support the probe manipulation, this paper proposed a novel posture detection of an US probe with a wire-grid structure in an US coupler gel. The proposed method detects the posture based on an acquired US image of the wire-grid which is fixed in the coupler gel on a patient body. Since the acquired image includes projections of wires and they are determined by the probe posture, the probe posture can be detected from the projections. Experiments evaluated the accuracy of the proposed method and showed the method achieved an easy-to-use and precise posture detection of US probe.