title: Development of an intelligent surgical instrument for otitis media with effusion.
abstract: To treat a worldwide common ear disease (OME), a device allowing fast grommet tube insertion has been designed in our earlier works (Gao et al., 2015 [1] and Liang et al., 2013 [2]). However, the instrument has to be manually placed as close as to the Tympanic Membrane before the insertion procedures. To realize a fully automated surgical process, the instrument shall be automatically manipulated to align to the axial direction of ear canal and proceed to complete the surgery. A vision-based servomechanism is proposed to solve the path planning problem. A fuzzy-gain-scheduled controller is proposed to minimize the projection error based on the image detection and the proximity measurement. The proposed controller is proven to outperform the traditional PI controller in pre-clinical trials.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore; NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Electronic address: gwc88@hotmail.com.
authors.forename: Wenchao
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Wenyu
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Kok Kiong
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Tan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001331:Automation; D004424:Ear Canal / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000601:surgery; D004867:Equipment Design; D005336:Fiber Optic Technology; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D006801:Humans; D008876:Middle Ear Ventilation; D010034:Otitis Media with Effusion / Q000601:surgery*; D013506:Otologic Surgical Procedures / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013525:Surgical Instruments; D014432:Tympanic Membrane / Q000033:anatomy & histology
keywords: Fuzzy logical gain scheduling; Surgical instrument; Vision servoing