RSV: Robotic Sonography for Thyroid Volumetry

In nuclear medicine, radioiodine therapy is prescribed to treat diseases like hyperthyroidism. The calculation of the dose depends, amongst other factors, on thyroid volume. This currently estimated using conventional 2D ultrasound imaging. However, this modality inherently user-dependant, resulting in high variability volume estimations. To increase reproducibility and consistency, we uniquely combine a neural network-based segmentation with an automatic robotic scanning for volumetry. acquisition achieved by 6 DoF arm attached probe. Its movement based online each lobe appearance US image. During post-processing, images are segmented obtain estimation. ablation study, demonstrated superiority motion guidance algorithms robot compared naive linear executed terms volumetric accuracy. user study phantom, measurements our system. mean measurement error expert users could be significantly decreased from $20.85\pm 16.10\%$ only notation="LaTeX">$8.23\pm 3.10\%$ ground truth. tendency was observed even more non-expert where improvement system measured as 85% which clearly shows advantages support.