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Robot planning for automated burn debridement
Abstract
A basic tenet in the treatment of burns is the removal of the burned dead tissue which acts as a haven for harmful bacteria. Contemporary techniques for the removal of burned skin tissue involve a tedious process of serial skin excisions in order to leave behind only viable skin tissue. This results in significant risk to the patient as it is accompanied by marked blood loss. Recently laser therapy has been used for burned tissue excision. However, such laser surgery: is presently manually controlled; is tedious to perform; and is virtually impossible to accomplish bloodlessly due to inability to manually control laser depth penetration accurately. This research develops the robot plan for a system that automatically debrides burned dead tissue on burn victims using a high energy laser for the ablation of the burned tissue. The automated robotic system consists of: a robot whose end effector is equipped with a laser head whence the laser beam emanates and a vision system that is used to acquire the 3-D coordinates of some points on the body surface; 3-D surface modelling routines for generating the surface model of the treatment area; and control and interface hardware and software for control and integration of all the system components. The entire process of automated burn debridement is achieved in two phases: an initial survey phase during which a model of the treatment area on the skin is built and used to plan an appropriate trajectory for the robot in the subsequent phase--the treatment phase during which the laser surgery is performed. During the survey phase, the vision system employs a camera to acquire points on the surface of the patient's body by using the camera to capture the contour traced by a plane of light generated by a low power laser distinct from the treatment laser. The camera's image is then processed. Selected points on the camera's 2-D image frame are used as input to a process that generates 3-D body surface points as the intersection point of the plane of light and the line of sight between the camera's image point and the body surface point. The acquired surface points are then used to generate a computational model of the treatment area using the Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) surface modelling technique. The constructed NURBS surface model is used to generate a treatment plan for the execution of the treatment procedure. During the treatment phase, the robot plan for ablating the dead tissue is generated. To achieve this, the burned area is first defined on the model. Then, based on the shape of the burned area, treatment patterns are generated to cover the entire area to be treated. Thirdly, based on the treatment patterns, the trajectory to be followed by the laser head to accomplish complete debridement of the dead tissue is generated. Fourthly, with the end effector's point interpolated trajectory necessary for effective treatment obtained, the robot plans the motions necessary for laser ablation of the dead tissue without an over- or under-cut. Accomplishing these steps leads to the generation of a plan for effective dead tissue ablation.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering
Recommended Citation
Nwodoh, Thomas Anayochukwu, "Robot planning for automated burn debridement" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9709638.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9709638