Fast calibration for ultrasound imaging guidance based on depth camera

During the process of robot-assisted ultrasound(US) puncture, it is important to estimate the location of the puncture from the 2D US images. To this end, the calibration of the US image becomes an important issue. In this paper, we proposed a depth camera-based US calibration method, where an easy-to-deploy device is designed for the calibration. With this device, the coordinates of the puncture needle tip are collected respectively in US image and in the depth camera, upon which a correspondence matrix is built for calibration. Finally, a number of experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our calibration method.