Data-Driven Needle Puncture Detection for Urgent Medical Care Delivery in Space (PhD Thesis Defense)

Needle decompression (ND) is a surgical procedure that treats one of the most preventable causes of trauma-related death: dangerous accumulations of air between the chest wall and the lungs. However, needle-tip overshoot of the target space can result in the inadvertent puncture of critical structures like the heart. This type of complication is fatal without urgent surgical care, which is not available in resource-poor environments like space. Since ND is done blind, operators rely on tool sensations to identify when the needle has reached its target. Needle instrumentation could enable puncture notifications to help operators limit tool-tip overshoot, but such a solution requires reliable puncture detection from manual (i.e., variable-velocity) needle insertion data streams. Data-driven puncture-detection (DDPD) algorithms are appropriate for this application, but their performance has historically been unacceptably low for use in safety-critical applications. We contribute towards the development of an intelligent device for manual ND assistance by proposing two novel DDPD algorithms. Three data sets are collected that provide needle forces, torques, and displacements during insertions into ex vivo porcine tissue analogs for the human chest, and factors affecting DDPD algorithm performance are analyzed in these data. Puncture event features are examined for each sensor, and the suitability of accelerometer measurements and diffuse reflectance is evaluated for ND. Finally, DDPD ensembles are proposed that yield a 5.1-fold improvement in precision as compared to the traditional force-only DDPD approach. These results lay a foundation for improving the urgent delivery of percutaneous procedures in space and other resource-poor settings.