Taking advantage of the vacuum effect of six thin bags containing ground coffee, it has been developed a headset that adapts perfectly to the patient’s skull, thereby ensuring a more precise tracking system to surgeons engaged in delicate interventions to the head.
A team of engineers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (Tennessee) has developed a silicone cuff that uses ground coffee to facilitate the work of doctors during delicate surgical procedures in the head. The curious device called “granular jamming cap” with reflective element, was presented today during a meeting of the Conference Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions, currently underway in Barcelona.
Before explaining how the headset is right to dwell on the reasons that led the American researchers to develop it. As you know, for surgery to his head requiring maximum precision they will utilize various tools, which work in synergy to provide physicians a real-time view of what is happening inside the patient. Among them are scanners, cameras and computers, which are connected to a TAC, creating a detailed 3D map of the soft tissues and bones?
All devices maintain synchrony thanks to helmets with reflective material markers, which, however, due to the movements of the scalp, make necessary continuous recalibration, also can push the doctors to make mistakes. This is basically a ‘drive system’ useful but not very precise, as pointed out by Professor Robert Webster, involved in realization the headset: “I am very delicate operations and developed a sophisticated guidance system to help surgeons, but doctors can not trust the system, as is sometimes perfect and sometimes it is inaccurate. ”
The engineering team has decided to use the principle of coffee packs. Under the silicone cuff are in fact placed six thin bags containing ground coffee, which once positioned, private air stiffen, taking exactly the shape of the patient’s skull. That allows much more stable to maintain the reflective material markers that drive the devices in the upper part of the headset. This is demonstrated by the reduction in the margin of error of 83 percent compared to normal cachets, as calculated in an experimental phase. A method for obtaining a still higher precision would be to drill holes in the patient’s skull and apply the reflective markers directly, but it is an invasive intervention and painful, which can be circumvented by exploiting the simple coffee.