Integration of Robotic Technology for Combining Multiple Views in Three-Dimensional Echocardiography

Echocardiography is one of the most widely used imaging modalities to diagnose cardiac disease. Although two-dimensional echocardiography is widely used, real-time three-dimensional (3D) echocardiography allows for scanning the heart in 3D and significantly improves the field of view. Despite the field of view improvement, the entire heart cannot be imaged in a single 3D echocardiography scan in most cases, and further improvements are needed to solve the problem. This study proposes a robotic arm-based multiview echocardiography fusion system to solve the field-of-view problem by tracking the transducer attached to the arm. In the proposed method, the cardiac structures of human participants are imaged from multiple positions using a 3D echocardiography scanning system. A preliminary evaluation of the system was performed with three volunteer participants. The alignment accuracies of multiple scans were evaluated by delineating the left ventricle in each scan and measuring the overlap between the first scan and the rest. The results demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves the accuracy of the alignment when images are transformed using tracking information compared to keeping them in their original image-based coordinate system. Future work will be devoted to solving alignment issues related to patient movement and respiration.