Visual exploration platform design for fine profile sensing in precision motion systems

Otitis media with effusion (OME), a worldwide common ear disease, affecting adults and children when the middle ear is infected. Grommet insertion treatment leads to the development and design of a medical device allowing fast and automatic grommet insertion in an earlier work. In the medical device design, a precision motion system is used to provide the accurate movements for the precise grommet insertion procedure. Besides that, a fiberscope is used to provide the vision for the device. Medical imaging is a technique or process to create visual representations of body for clinical analysis and medical intervention. This paper addresses the design consideration and evaluation of a built-in visual analysis platform equipped on the eardrum microsurgery device. In this special configuration, a fiberscope is placed within the tip of a cutting tool to facilitate image analysis of the motorised surgery with high precision movement. Images from this fiberscope are analysed to build important features during the operation such as proximity estimation, angle measurement and touch detection. These enhanced features are hardly achieved in the traditional approach where a common microscope is used. The platform is implemented under a computerised system and evaluated through experimental results.