Towards Automated Initial Probe Placement in Transthoracic Teleultrasound Using Human Mesh and Skeleton Recovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated framework for initial probe placement in transthoracic teleultrasound using RGB images and skeleton recovery, aiming to assist novices and robots in accurate probe positioning without expert help.

Contribution

The novel framework combines RGB camera data, skeleton inference, and virtual guidance to automate initial probe placement in teleultrasound, reducing reliance on expert intervention.

Findings

Achieved consistent initial probe placement within acceptable anatomical variability.

Validated the approach with pilot experiments on healthy volunteers.

Demonstrated effective overlay of guidance on reconstructed body mesh.

Abstract

Cardiac and lung ultrasound are technically demanding because operators must identify patient-specific intercostal acoustic windows and then navigate between standard views by adjusting probe position, rotation, and force across different imaging planes. These challenges are amplified in teleultrasound when a novice or robot faces the difficult task of first placing the probe on the patient without in-person expert assistance. We present a framework for automating Patient registration and anatomy-informed Initial Probe placement Guidance (PIPG) using only RGB images from a calibrated camera. The novice first captures the patient using the camera on a mixed reality (MR) head-mounted display (HMD). An edge server then infers a patient-specific body-surface and skeleton model, with spatial smoothing across multiple views. Using bony landmarks from the predicted skeleton, we estimate the intercostal region and project the guidance back onto the reconstructed body surface. To validate the framework, we overlaid the reconstructed body mesh and the virtual probe pose guidance across multiple transthoracic echocardiography scan planes in situ and measured the quantitative placement error. Pilot experiments with healthy volunteers suggest that the proposed probe placement prediction and MR guidance yield consistent initial placement within anatomical variability acceptable for teleultrasound setup