Intelligent Handheld Instrument for Microsurgery and Biotech Micromanipulation

PI: Asst. Prof Wei Tech Ang

Group Members: Cheng Yap Shee, Kalyana C. Veluvolu, U-Xuan Tan and Win Tun Latt

The objective of this project is to enhance human positioning accuracy in micromanipulation tasks. The targeted applications are microsurgery and cell micromanipulation. Real-time active error compensation within a completely handheld instrument is proposed. The intelligent microsurgical or biological laboratory instrument would detect its own motion, distinguish between undesired and intended motion, and deflects its tip for active compensation of physiological tremor and other erroneous components of the movement.

There 4 interrelated portions in this Intelligent Handheld Instrument for Microsurgery and Biotech Micromanipulation project:

· Sensing: Novel microscope vision-aided all accelerometer inertial measurement unit (IMU) is designed to sense the instantaneous motion of the instrument tip with high resolution and an augmented state quaternion-based Kalman filter is used to achieve high accuracy.

· Extraction of tremor : Multi-bandwidth fourier linear combination (MFLC) is used to differentiate and extract the tremor data from the motion sensed.

· Mechanism Design: Given the space constrain and the large workspace required, a parallel manipulator is designed to manipulate the instrument’s tip. To be cost effective removal of backlash, SLA is used to manufacture the manipulator.

· Control: Piezo-actuators are used as they are known for their high bandwidth. The mechanism will be modeled and the movement will be controlled by controlling the hysteretic piezoelectric actuators.

Successful implementation of this technology sees an immediate impact in numerous medical disciplines and biotech research where manual manipulation precision is a premium. These include plastic, neurological, vitreoretinal, otorhinolaryngological, and microvascular microsurgeries, intracytoplamic sperm injection, embryo cell dissection etc. Not only do the quality and consistency of many microsurgeries are raised and maintained, new doors are also opened to many potential treatments, procedures, and researches.