Intensity-based visual servoing for non-rigid motion compensation of soft tissue structures due to physiological motion using 4D ultrasound

This paper presents a visual-servoing method for compensating motion of soft tissue structures using 4D ultra-sound. The motion of soft tissue structures caused by physiological and external motion makes it difficult to investigate them for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. The main goal is to track non-rigidly moving soft tissue structures and compensate the motion in order to keep a lesion on its target position during a treatment. We define a 3D non-rigid motion model by extending the Thin-Plate Spline (TPS) algorithm. The motion parameters are estimated with intensity-value changes of a points set in a tracking soft tissue structure. Finally, the global rigid motion is compensated with a 6-DOF robot according to the motion parameters of the tracking structure. Simulation experiments are performed with recorded 3D US images of in-vivo soft tissue structures and validate the effectiveness of the non-rigid motion tracking method. Robotic experiments demonstrated the success of our method with a deformable phantom.