Utilizing Sonographer Visual Attention for Probe Movement Guidance in Cardiac Point of Care Ultrasound

We present a proof-of-concept of a probe guidance system for cardiac ultrasound (US) aiming to assist novice sonographers during the imaging of the Apical 4 Chamber and Parasternal Long Axis standard views. Our system treats probe guidance as a sonographer behavior cloning task and employs a recurrent neural network to generate a probe-orientation guidance signal solely from US images. We trained the network using mainly US images and probe orientation data collected during US phantom scans performed by volunteer sonographers. However, our training method also utilizes an additional sonographer visual attention modality to feed an auxiliary training task. The evaluation of our system shows that it generates a guidance signal with an accuracy of at least 80% for the following angular ranges: [3°, 15°] for the y and z axes, and [4°, 15°] for the x-axis.