Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 28, 2023 - July 01, 2023
Scanning path planning is an essential technology for fully automated ultrasound (US) robotics. During abdominal US scanning, the ribs are critical body surface landmarks for scanning path planning. We proposed a method for determining the rib region using RGB-D images and respiratory variation. We generated a depth difference image by finding the difference between the depth image taken at the resting inspiratory position and the depth image taken at the maximum inspiratory position, which clearly shows the rib position. The rib position was then determined by yolov5 object detection model to this depth difference image. In the experiment conducted with nine subjects, the proposed method of rib detection using depth difference images marked an IoU of 0.951 and average confidence of 0.77. The average error between the ground truth and predicted positions was 15 pixels ≃ 7.5 mm. The results were superior to rib detection using only the RGB image.
