ARMO projects gets WPI/UMass Seed Funding

Co-Principal investigators, Dr. Michael A. King (UMMS, Radiology) and Dr. Michael Gennert (WPI, Robotics Engineering), and Dr. Clifford Lindsay (UMMS, Radiology).

Short Abstract:

During medical imaging, patient motion is virtually unavoidable, presenting a significant source of image degradation. Testing the accuracy of motion estimation and motion compensation methods during image acquisition requires the ability to independently know the true motion. The goal of this project is to develop the first robotic arm to study the effects of known motion with respect to various types of medical imaging methods such as SPECT, CT, PET, and MRI. The robotic arm, which we call ARMO, will be used to precisely displace anatomically accurate test objects during image acquisition to better understand the negative impact of motion on medical images and the accuracy of the imaging systems. The innovative aspect of this proposal is that it will not only be the first robotic phantom that can provide ground truth motion and image data, but it will be programmable to provide a wide variety of different motions without the need for human subjects. ARMO will allow us to begin to fully understand the implications of motion in medical imaging across a wide variety of modalities which is particularly important for ever increasing desire to image smaller regions-of-interest with higher-resolution imaging systems. A highlight of this project is that it will utilize a cross-disciplinary team from UMass Chan Medical School’s Department of Radiology and WPI Robotics Engineering which bring together expertise in areas covering medical physics, imaging, computer vision, and robotics to foster collaboration between UMass and WPI.