Workspace Analysis and Design Improvement of a Carotid Flow Measurement System

Redundancy Exploitation of an 8-DoF Robotic Assistant for Doppler Sonography

The design of a teleoperated 8-DoF redundant robot for Doppler sonography is detailed in this paper. The proposed robot is composed of a 7-DoF robotic arm mounted on a 1-DoF linear axis. This solution has been conceived to allow Doppler ultrasound examination of the entire patient’s body. This paper details the design of the platform and proposes two alternative control modes to deal with its redundancy at the torque level. The first control mode considers the robot as a full 8-DoF kinematics chain, synchronizing the action of the eight joints and improving the global robot manipulability. The second control mode decouples the 7-DoF arm and the linear axis controllers and proposes a switching strategy to activate the linear axis motion when the robot arm approaches the workspace limits. Moreover, a new adaptive Joint-Limit Avoidance (JLA) strategy is proposed with the aim of exploiting the redundancy of the 7-DoF anthropomorphic arm. Unlike classical JLA approaches, a weighting matrix is actively adapted to prioritize those joints that are approaching the mechanical limits. Simulations and experimental results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control modes.

Telerobotic Sonography for Remote Diagnostic Imaging: Narrative Review of Current Developments and Clinical Applications

Access to sonographers and sonologists is limited in many communities around the world. Telerobotic sonography (robotic ultrasound) is a new technology to increase access to sonography, providing sonographers and sonologists the ability to manipulate an ultrasound probe from a distant location and remotely perform ultrasound examinations. This narrative review discusses the development of telerobotic ultrasound systems, clinical studies evaluating the feasibility and diagnostic accuracy of telerobotic sonography, and emerging use of telerobotic sonography in clinical settings. Telerobotic sonography provides an opportunity to provide real-time ultrasound examinations to underserviced rural and remote communities to increase equity in the delivery of diagnostic imaging.

Common Carotid Artery Diameter, Blood Flow Velocity and Wave Intensity Responses at Rest and during Exercise in Young Healthy Humans: A Reproducibility Study

The aim of this study was to assess the reproducibility of non-invasive, ultrasound-derived wave intensity (WI) in humans at the common carotid artery. Common carotid artery diameter and blood velocity of 12 healthy young participants were recorded at rest and during mild cycling, to assess peak diameter, change in diameter, peak velocity, change in velocity, time derivatives, non-invasive wave speed and WI. Diameter, velocity and WI parameters were fairly reproducible. Diameter variables exhibited higher reproducibility than corresponding velocity variables (intra-class correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.79 vs. 0.73) and lower dispersion (coefficient of variation [CV] = 5% vs. 9%). Wave speed had fair reproducibility (ICC = 0.6, CV = 16%). WI energy variables exhibited higher reproducibility than corresponding peaks (ICC = 0.78 vs. 0.74) and lower dispersion (CV = 16% vs. 18%). The majority of variables had higher ICCs and lower CVs during exercise. We conclude that non-invasive WI analysis is reliable both at rest and during exercise.