Optimizing robot motion for robotic ultrasound-guided radiation therapy.

Optimizing robot motion for robotic ultrasound-guided radiation therapy. Phys Med Biol. 2019 Aug 19;: Authors: Schlüter M, Fürweger C, Schlaefer A Abstract An important aspect of robotic radiation therapy is active compensation of target motion. Recently, ultrasound has been proposed to obtain real-time volumetric images of abdominal organ motion. One approach to realize flexible probe placement throughout the treatment fraction is based on a robotic arm holding the ultrasound probe. However, the probe and the robot holding it may obstruct some of the beams with a potentially adverse effect on the plan quality. This can be mitigated by using a kinematically redundant robot, which allows maintaining a steady pose of the ultrasound probe while moving its elbow in order to minimize beam blocking. Ultimately, the motion of both the beam source carrying and the ultrasound probe holding robot contribute to the overall treatment time. We propose an approach to optimize the motion and coordination of both robots based on a generalized traveling salesman problem. Furthermore, we study an application of the model to a prostate treatment scenario. Because the underlying optimization problem is hard, we compare results from a state-of-the-art heuristic solver and an approximation scheme with low computational effort. Our results show that integration of the robot holding the ultrasound probe is feasible with acceptable overhead in overall trea...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research