UltraDP: Generalizable Carotid Ultrasound Scanning with Force-Aware Diffusion Policy

TL;DR

UltraDP introduces a diffusion-policy-based approach for autonomous carotid ultrasound scanning, effectively handling patient variability and ensuring safe, precise imaging through multi-modal sensing and specialized guidance.

Contribution

The paper presents UltraDP, a novel diffusion policy method with a guidance module and hybrid force control, improving generalization and safety in autonomous ultrasound scanning.

Findings

Achieved 95% success rate in transverse carotid scans on unseen subjects.

Built a large-scale dataset with 210 scans and 460k samples.

Demonstrated effective multi-modal sensor integration for autonomous operation.

Abstract

Ultrasound scanning is a critical imaging technique for real-time, non-invasive diagnostics. However, variations in patient anatomy and complex human-in-the-loop interactions pose significant challenges for autonomous robotic scanning. Existing ultrasound scanning robots are commonly limited to relatively low generalization and inefficient data utilization. To overcome these limitations, we present UltraDP, a Diffusion-Policy-based method that receives multi-sensory inputs (ultrasound images, wrist camera images, contact wrench, and probe pose) and generates actions that are fit for multi-modal action distributions in autonomous ultrasound scanning of carotid artery. We propose a specialized guidance module to enable the policy to output actions that center the artery in ultrasound images. To ensure stable contact and safe interaction between the robot and the human subject, a hybrid force-impedance controller is utilized to drive the robot to track such trajectories. Also, we have built a large-scale training dataset for carotid scanning comprising 210 scans with 460k sample pairs from 21 volunteers of both genders. By exploring our guidance module and DP's strong generalization ability, UltraDP achieves a 95% success rate in transverse scanning on previously unseen subjects, demonstrating its effectiveness.