INKA chair presents a new concept for guiding medical interventional devices in the prestigious Scientific Reports journal.
The Data Processing group of the INKA chair, lead by Dr. Alfredo Illanes, has published in Scientific Reports an innovative concept for acquiring additional complementary information for guiding medical interventional devices (MID) in minimally invasive procedures. This concept is based on using acoustic emission (AE) with a sensor connected at the proximal end of the tool for “listening” to the tool tip-tissue interaction dynamics during the minimally invasive procedure. They have demonstrated that the audio signal resulting from such interactions starting at the tip of the instrument naturally propagates through the tool’s shaft and can be externally acquired. This signal can then be processed in order to extract useful guidance information that can be then mapped into feedback to surgeons during minimally invasive procedures.
This work showed promising results for automatically detect tissue/tissue passage during needle insertion and for automatic identification of vessel perforation during guide wire insertion. The main advantage of this novel approach is that no sensor is needed to be placed in direct contact with the patient organs and tissues. Additionally, it is possible to acquire information from conventional MIDs, as a sort of plug-and-play device without the necessity of rebuild specialized instruments and use the already existing ones. This should result in less complicated solutions than the existing one, allowing a faster clinical approval.