mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Ultrasound-Guided Robotic Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2003.13321 ↗First posted 30 Mar 2020cs.LG cs.RO stat.MLcited by 17

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we introduce the first reinforcement learning (RL) based robotic navigation method which utilizes ultrasound (US) images as an input. Our approach combines state-of-the-art RL techniques, specifically deep Q-networks (DQN) with memory buffers and a binary classifier for deciding when to terminate the task. Our method is trained and evaluated on an in-house collected data-set of 34 volunteers and when compared to pure RL and supervised learning (SL) techniques, it performs substantially better, which highlights the suitability of RL navigation for US-guided procedures. When testing our proposed model, we obtained a 82.91% chance of navigating correctly to the sacrum from 165 different starting positions on 5 different unseen simulated environments.

Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 5; 2022: 2; 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

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  1. 2021Autonomous Navigation of an Ultrasound Probe Towards Standard Scan Planes with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
  2. 2021Rethinking Ultrasound Augmentation: A Physics-Inspired Approachcited by 15
  3. 2023Intelligent Robotic Sonographer: Mutual Information-based Disentangled Reward Learning from Few Demonstrationscited by 14
  4. 2022VesNet-RL: Simulation-based Reinforcement Learning for Real-World US Probe Navigationcited by 12
  5. 2021Image-Guided Navigation of a Robotic Ultrasound Probe for Autonomous Spinal Sonography Using a Shadow-aware Dual-Agent Frameworkcited by 6
  6. 2024Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning for ultrasound navigation guidancecited by 6
  7. 2022Accelerated Intravascular Ultrasound Imaging using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 4
  8. 2024Cardiac ultrasound simulation for autonomous ultrasound navigationcited by 4
  9. 2021Pessimistic Model Selection for Offline Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  10. 2024Autonomous Path Planning for Intercostal Robotic Ultrasound Imaging Using Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  11. 2021Next-Gen Machine Learning Supported Diagnostic Systems for Spacecraftcited by 2
  12. 2025Shape Completion and Real-Time Visualization in Robotic Ultrasound Spine Acquisitionscited by 2
5 more
  1. 2025End-to-End Framework Integrating Generative AI and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Ultrasound Scanningcited by 0
  2. 2026SonoSelect: Efficient Ultrasound Perception via Active Probe Explorationcited by 0
  3. 2026SAMe: A Semantic Anatomy Mapping Engine for Robotic Ultrasoundcited by 0
  4. 2026Scanning While Imagining: A Scene-Graph World Model for Robotic Ultrasound Navigationcited by 0
  5. 2026Dual-Rate Force-Image Control with Model-Based Orientation Limits for Robotic Ultrasoundcited by 0