Experiments with the TER Tele-Echography Robot Adriana Vilchis 1 , Jocelyne Troccaz 1 , Philippe Cinquin 1 , Agnes Guerraz 2 , Franck Pelli- sier 2 , Pierre Thorel 2 , Bertrand Tondu 3 , Fabien Courrèges 4 , Gérard Poisson 4 , Marc Althuser 5 , Jean-Marc Ayoubi 5 1 TIMC/IMAG laboratory, Domaine de la Merci, F-38706 La Tronche cedex - France 2 France Telecom R&D, 3 INSA Toulouse, 4 LVR Bourges, 5 CHU Grenoble adriana.vilchis@imag.fr , jocelyne.troccaz@imag.fr Abstract. This paper presents a master-slave system applied to the remote diagnosis from echographic data. The motion of the master manipulator is remotely controlled by a physician and reproduced by a slave robot carrying the echographic probe. The contact force between the probe and the patient is fed back to operator allowing him to have a haptic virtual environment. The innovation of this haptic control is to preserve medical expert propioception and gesture feelings, which are necessary to synchronize the ultrasound images with the motion made by the medical doctor. The slave robot is a cable-driven manipulator using pneumatic artificial muscle actuators to control the motion of the ultrasound probe. In this paper we present the architecture and the performances of the slave robot and the first experiments of the master-slave remote echography system for examinations of pregnant women. 1 Introduction Among many types of medical equipment, ultrasound diagnostic systems are widely used because of their convenience and innocuously. Performing an ultrasound examination involves good hand-eye coordination and the ability to integrate the acquired information over time and space; the physician has to be able to mentally build 3D information from both the 2D images and the gesture information and to put a diagnosis from this information. Some of these specialized skills may lack in some healthcare centers or for emergency situations. Tele-consultation is therefore an interesting alternative to conventional care. Development of a high performance remote diagnostic system, which enables an expert operator at the hospital to examine a patient at home, in an emergency vehicle or in a remote clinic, may have a very significant added value. Some previous tele-echography and robot-based echography systems have been developed [1-8]. Some of these approaches are purely tele-medicine projects (see [5] for example). A second class of systems allows to automate an echographic examination using a robot [3,4]. Finally, a last category of robot-based systems enables the remote examination of patients by a distant expert with [3,6] or without [2, 8] force feedback. Many of the robot-based systems integrate conventional robot architectures and actuation. One objective of this research was to propose a new architecture of low weight, compliant and portable medical robots.