Finding an Initial Probe Pose in Teleoperated Robotic Echocardiography via 2D LiDAR-Based 3D Reconstruction
PUBLICATION DATE: 9 September, 2025 PUBLICATION AUTHOR/S: Mariadas Capsran Roshan, Edgar M Hidalgo, Mats Isakssson, Michelle Dunn, Jagannatha Charjee PyarakaEchocardiography is a key imaging modality for cardiac assessment but remains highly operator-dependent, and access to trained sonographers is limited in underserved settings. Teleoperated robotic echocardiography has been proposed as a solution, however, clinical studies report longer examination times than manual procedures, increasing diagnostic delays and operator workload. Automating non-expert tasks, such as automatically moving the probe to an ideal starting pose, offers a pathway to reduce this burden. Prior vision and depth-based approaches to estimate an initial probe pose are sensitive to lighting, texture, and anatomical variability.
We propose a robot-mounted 2D LiDAR-based approach that reconstructs the chest surface in 3D and estimates the initial probe pose automatically. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of robot-mounted 2D LiDAR used for 3D reconstruction of a human body surface. Through plane based extrinsic calibration, the transformation between the LiDAR and robot base frames was estimated with an overall root mean square (RMS) residual of 1.82 mm and rotational uncertainty below 0.2◦
. The chest front surface, reconstructed from two linear LiDAR sweeps, was aligned with non-rigid templates to identify an initial probe pose. Mannequin-based study assessing reconstruction accuracy showed mean surface errors of 2.78±0.21 mm. Human trials (N=5) evaluating the proposed approach found probe initial points typically 20–30 mm from the clinically defined initial point, while the variation across repeated trials on the same subject was less than 4 mm.
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