A Combined Deep Learning and Anatomical Inch Measurement Approach to Robotic Acupuncture Points Positioning

Acupuncture therapy is one of the cornerstones in traditional Chinese medicine. It requires rich experiences from Chinese medicine practitioner. However, repeatability among different practitioners are low. Meanwhile, there is a large variety of skin conditions in terms of color, diseases, size, etc. In recent year, deep neural network for acupuncture point detection is proposed. However, it is difficult to localize multiple acupuncture points. In this paper, a high repeatability robot with a new approach of acupuncture points positioning is proposed which can be adaptive to variety skin conditions and achieve multiple acupuncture points’ localization.Clinical Relevance— This system can provide identical acupuncture therapy to different patients. Thus, the quality of the therapy can be practitioner independent. Furthermore, the machine operation is simple therefore manual error can be reduced significantly. As the result, the efficiency and accuracy of therapy can be increased.