Medical instrument detection is essential for computer-assisted interventions since it would facilitate the surgeons to find the instrument efficiently with a better interpretation, which leads to a better outcome. This article reviews medical instrument detection methods in the ultrasound-guided intervention. First, we present a comprehensive review of instrument detection methodologies, which include traditional non-data-driven methods and data-driven methods. The non-data-driven methods were extensively studied prior to the era of machine learning, i.e. data-driven approaches. We discuss the main clinical applications of medical instrument detection in ultrasound, including anesthesia, biopsy, prostate brachytherapy, and cardiac catheterization, which were validated on clinical datasets. Finally, we selected several principal publications to summarize the key issues and potential research directions for the computer-assisted intervention community.
CathFlow: Self-Supervised Segmentation of Catheters in Interventional Ultrasound Using Optical Flow and Transformers
Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院哈姆林外科机器人中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
A Narrative Review of Image Processing Techniques Related to Prostate Ultrasound
School of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen University Medical School, Shenzhen University（深圳大学医学部生物医学工程学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学计算机科学与工程学系）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, CAS（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；John Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）
Medical Ultrasound (US), despite its wide use, is characterized by artifacts and operator dependency. Those attributes hinder the gathering and utilization of US datasets for the training of Deep Neural Networks used for Computer-Assisted Intervention Systems. Data augmentation is commonly used to enhance model generalization and performance. However, common data augmentation techniques, such as affine transformations do not align with the physics of US and, when used carelessly can lead to unrealistic US images. To this end, we propose a set of physics-inspired transformations, including defo…
Applying machine learning technologies, especially deep learning, into medical image segmentation is being widely studied because of its state-of-the-art performance and results. It can be a key step to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis, such as 3D reconstruction of human tissues, image-guided interventions, image analyzing and visualization. In this review article, deep-learning-based methods for ultrasound image segmentation are categorized into six main groups according to their architectures and training at first. Secondly, for each group, several current representative algor…
Segmentation of ultrasound images is an essential task in both diagnosis and image-guided interventions given the ease-of-use and low cost of this imaging modality. As manual segmentation is tedious and time consuming, a growing body of research has focused on the development of automatic segmentation algorithms. Deep learning algorithms have shown remarkable achievements in this regard; however, they need large training datasets. Unfortunately, preparing large labeled datasets in ultrasound images is prohibitively difficult. Therefore, in this study, we propose the use of simulated ultrasound…
Force Sensing Guided Artery-Vein Segmentation via Sequential Ultrasound Images
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HK Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Ultrasound (US) is one of the most commonly used imaging modalities in both diagnosis and surgical interventions due to its low-cost, safety, and non-invasive characteristic. US image segmentation is currently a unique challenge because of the presence of speckle noise. As manual segmentation requires considerable efforts and time, the development of automatic segmentation algorithms has attracted researchers attention. Although recent methodologies based on convolutional neural networks have shown promising performances, their success relies on the availability of a large number of training d…
ImFusion GmbH（ImFusion有限责任公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Multi-modal registration is a required step for many image-guided procedures, especially ultrasound-guided interventions that require anatomical context. While a number of such registration algorithms are already available, they all require a good initialization to succeed due to the challenging appearance of ultrasound images and the arbitrary coordinate system they are acquired in. In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve the problem of registration of an ultrasound sweep to a pre-operative image. We learn dense keypoint descriptors from which we then estimate the registration. We…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Many interventional surgical procedures rely on medical imaging to visualise and track instruments. Such imaging methods not only need to be real-time capable, but also provide accurate and robust positional information. In ultrasound applications, typically only two-dimensional data from a linear array are available, and as such obtaining accurate positional estimation in three dimensions is non-trivial. In this work, we first train a neural network, using realistic synthetic training data, to estimate the out-of-plane offset of an object with the associated axial aberration in the reconstruc…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
Biomechanical modelling of soft tissue provides a non-data-driven method for constraining medical image registration, such that the estimated spatial transformation is considered biophysically plausible. This has not only been adopted in real-world clinical applications, such as the MR-to-ultrasound registration for prostate intervention of interest in this work, but also provides an explainable means of understanding the organ motion and spatial correspondence establishment. This work instantiates the recently-proposed physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to a 3D linear elastic model for …
VibNet: Vibration-Boosted Needle Detection in Ultrasound Images
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Multi-scale Medical Robotics Centre（多尺度医疗机器人中心）；School of Medicine, Central Institute for Translational Cancer Research (TranslaTUM), Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学医学院、转化癌症研究中心（TranslaTUM））
