Grant: Discovery Horizons

Cardiovascular disease remains the world's number one killer. A rapid and timely access to medical ultrasound modalities is critical to reduce morbidity and mortality in patients. The lack of clinical experts in remote areas considerably limits, however, the access to this primary imaging modality. This is a major issue since the incidence of cardiovascular disease has been shown to be higher among people in remote areas, including Indigenous populations. This proposal aims to resolve this issue by providing Canadians in remote areas with on-site access to a unique imaging infrastructure that consists of an Autonomous Robot for Quantitative UltraSounds (ARQUS) system. The development and validation of the ARQUS system require advanced methods and complementary multidisciplinary expertise in robotics, cardiovascular engineering, deep reinforcement learning and cardiovascular imaging. All are critical to the success of this proposal, which aims at developing a transformative infrastructure consisting of the first fully autonomous robotic system that can "learn" how to perform advanced clinical ultrasound measurements. The ARQUS system will be capable of performing advanced ultrasound imaging and measurements for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. It will mostly consist of 1) a robotic arm holding an ultrasound probe; 2) a visual servoing controller to track the region of interest; 3) a novel, fast and efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithm trained on a dataset of patients with cardiovascular disease to optimize the spatial orientation of the ultrasound probe. A two-step approach will be used for the validation of the ARQUS: 1) an in vitro validation on a custom-made 3D-printed state-of-the-art patient-specific heart duplicator. This approach is unique since it will allow for a thorough validation against gold-standard laboratory measurements; 2) an in vivo validation on patients against the results obtained by skilled sonographers. Our interdisciplinary team has complementary expertise in engineering and health sciences. The team has all the required expertise to successfully achieve the goals of this ambitious, yet feasible, interdisciplinary proposal. The interdisciplinary approach suggested in this proposal will allow several highly qualified personnel to acquire a multidisciplinary training and develop soft skills that are critical assets in today's research and industry environments.