Full Motion Tracking in Ultrasound Using Image Speckle Information and Visual Servoing

This paper presents a new visual servoing method that is able to stabilize a moving area of soft tissue within an ultrasound B-mode imaging plane. The approach consists of moving the probe in order to minimize the relative position between a target imaging plane and the ultrasound plane observed by the probe of the moving tissue target. The problem is decoupled into motion out-of-plane and motion within plane. For the former, a new original method based on the speckle information contained in the images is developed. For the latter, an image region tracker is used to provide the in-plane motion. A visual servoing control scheme is then developed to perform the tracking robotic task. The method is validated on simulated motions of a probe on a static ultrasound volume acquired from a phantom.