Chinese-led team’s ultrasound robot uses AI for thyroid scan results ‘close’ to that of doctors

Fully autonomous system ‘can perform high-quality ultrasound, close to manual scans obtained by clinicians’, team says in Nature Communications paper

Data collected could promote medical efficiency, but further clinical studies needed to assess robot’s safety as screening tool for malignancies

Reading Time:3 minutes

The AI-enabled robot is able to carry out thyroid scans while the patient is sitting down, and adjusts the position of the probe based on AI reasoning. Photo: SCUT

Published: 9:00pm, 23 May 2024

A team of scientists based in China and Canada may have become the first to deploy a fully autonomous ultrasound robot for thyroid scans, with results “close” to that of human doctors.

The robot used artificial intelligence to perform the exams and identify malignant nodules – all without human assistance.

The team, led by researchers at the South China University of Technology (SCUT), used human skeleton recognition, reinforcement learning, and physical force feedback to develop their fully autonomous robotic ultrasound system (FARUS).

“Experimental results on human participants demonstrated that this system can perform high-quality ultrasound, close to manual scans obtained by clinicians”, as well as detect and identify characteristics of nodules, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications earlier this month.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-human study of fully autonomous robotic ultrasound scanning for thyroid.”

According to Du Guanglong, study author and professor at SCUT, the system is able to “independently scan the thyroid area and identify malignant nodules without human assistance”.