Ultrasound-Guided Robotic Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Understand

In this paper we introduce the first reinforcement learning (RL) based robotic navigation method which utilizes ultrasound (US) images as an input.

• Our approach combines state-of-the-art RL techniques, specifically deep Q-networks (DQN) with memory buffers and a binary classifier for deciding when to terminate the task.
• Our method is trained and evaluated on an in-house collected data-set of 34 volunteers and when compared to pure RL and supervised learning (SL) techniques, it performs substantially better, which highlights the suitability of RL navigation for US-guided procedures.
• When testing our proposed model, we obtained a 82.91% chance of navigating correctly to the sacrum from 165 different starting positions on 5 different unseen simulated environments.