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Ultrasound (US) tomography enables quantitative measurement of acoustic properties. Robot assisted ultrasound tomography system enables alignment of two US probes. The alignment is done automatically by the robotic arm so that tomographic reconstruction of more anatomies becomes possible. In this study, we propose a new system setup for robot assistance in US tomographic imaging. This setup includes two robotic arms holding two US probes. One of the robotic arms is operated by the sonographer to determine the desired location for the tomographic imaging; this probe can also provide the B-mode US image during the search. The other robotic arm can then move automatically to align the two probes. One of the probes will act as transmitter and the other one as receiver to enable tomographic imaging. We provide an overview of the system setup and components together with the calibration procedures. In an attempt to provide a complete framework for the tomography system, we also provide a sample tomographic reconstruction method that can reconstruct speed of sound image using two aligned linear US probes. The reconstruction algorithm is however very prone to alignment inaccuracies. We provide an error propagation analysis to provide an estimation of the overall alignment error and then show the effect of the in-plane translational error in the tomographic reconstruction.

In this study, we are proposing a robot-assisted ultrasound tomography system that can offer soft tissue tomographic imaging and deeper or faster scan of the anatomy. This system consists of a robot-held ultrasound probe that tracks the position of another freehand probe, trying to align with it. One of the major challenges is achieving proper alignment of the two ultrasound probes. To enable proper alignment, two ultrasound calibrations and one hand-eye calibration are required. However, the system functionality and design is such that the ultrasound calibrations have become a challenge. In this paper, after providing an overview of the proposed robotic ultrasound tomography system, we focus on the calibrations problem. The results of the calibrations show a point reconstruction precision of a few millimeters for the current prototype, and the two images have at least 50% overlap visually; confirming the feasibility of such a system relying on accurate probe alignments.