A Kinect-based scan path planning method for ultrasound imaging

In hospitals, the doctors at sonography department often need to examine many patients every day. To alleviate the working burden, an automatic examination using some machines is needed. In this paper, by using the depth data captured by Kinect, the 3-D scene could be reconstructed with Visualization Toolkit, then the scan path could be automatically acquired with our method based on the 3-D scene. At last, the 3-D translation device, based on the scan path, is adopted to control the movement of ultrasound probe to scan the tissue surface. And the experimental results show that the method is available for planning an appropriate scan path and making the ultrasound probe touch the tissue surface accurately in the mechanical scanning.