Recently, we described a reconstruction method of the blood vessel network by 3D thinning to detect vessels bifurcations, which is applied to the control of microbubbles in vivo. However, that method did not include error detections and was only verified on a very simply shaped artificial blood vessel. In this paper we propose a system including an abstraction method for the blood vessel network. Such a model is then analyzed through graph theory and error patterns in the reconstructed network. We proceeded in vitro by acquiring volume data from an artificial capillary with multi-bifurcations whose diameter ranges from 0.5 to 2.0mm and with different flow velocities. We were able to reconstruct the blood vessel network of an in vitro artificial capillary with multi-bifurcations. Results show that our system successfully reconstructed the corresponding networks as much as the limitation of resolution of echography.

This paper presents a slave robot carrying an ultrasound probe for remote echographic examination. This robot is integrated in a master-slave system called robotic tele-echography (TER). The system allows an expert operator to perform a remote diagnosis from echographic data he acquires on a patient located in a distant place. The originality of this robot lies in its architecture: the cable-driven robot is lightweight and semirigid, and it is positioned on the patient body. In this paper, we describe the clinical application, the system architecture, the second implementation of the robot, and experiments performed with this prototype.

We have developed a three dimensional movable robot for an ultrasound probe for tele-echography system to apply between hospital, clinic and home. The probe movable mechanism is carefully designed not to damage the human body since miniature force sensors detect not only total contact force to the body surface but also angle of the probe to the surface. Angle and position of probe are controlled not to exceed dangerous contact force. We tried to control it via LAN and 128K ISDN by using a two-axis joystick under the Object Request Broker technique. We found that real time control was possible with an image stream. Though the delay time of the image makes the examiner stressful, we confirmed that remote diagnosis of the human abdomen is useful.