INTEGRATION OF PORTABLE ULTRASOUND IMAGING WITH OPTICAL TRACKING FOR TREATMENT GUIDANCE

Abstract

The integration of ultrasound devices with optical tracking systems has been explored in various medical applications to enhance diagnostic accuracy and procedural guidance. In the evolving field of medical imaging, portable ultrasound devices are transforming diagnostics and treatment guidance. To our knowledge, there is no an available development that integrates both the information from a portable device such as Philips Lumify and an optical tracking system such as Polaris Vega VT system (Northern Digital Inc.) in order to guide medical procedures. Moreover, Philips does not provide an application programming interface to access data from the portable device. The objective of this bachelor thesis was to develop a solution that integrates such information into the open-source software platform 3D Slicer for navigation purposes. The integration was achieved by means of (1) the ScreenStream application to send the data from the Lumify Application to Plus Server, (2) attaching a rigid body with passive markers to the ultrasound probe to track its pose and send the data to Plus Server, (3) creating an Extensible Markup Language (XML) configuration file for Plus Server to send data to 3D Slicer, and (4) performing calibrations to 3D-positioning of ultrasound images. The accuracy of this 3D-positioning yielded a target registration error (TRE) of approximately 1.20 mm. While the bachelor thesis met its objective, there is space for improvement. There is a real need for refinement to enhance the reliability and utility. For instance, the latency in the ultrasound data transmission from the tablet to 3D Slicer was around 1 s, which is too large for the ultrasound images to be considered to be displayed in real time. Nevertheless, future work on this topic is considered since this integration allows for tracking ultrasound images, with the goal of more accurate and efficient procedures.