9628840 Nnaji This Small Grant for Exploratory Research award investigates ways that technologies used in manufacturing automation can be used in health fields, specifically in the treatment of burns. Burn debridement is the process where burn damaged skin is removed to determine the depth of a burn and the presence of viable skin tissue. Today a surgeon uses lasers to perform this task by vaporizing burned tissue. This is a tedious task for the surgeon and dangerous for an already weakened patient because of the difficulty in controlling the depth of penetration of the laser. This award will investigate the integration of technologies used in manufacturing to perform the burn debridement task. The technical approach uses structured light scanning to construct a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) model of the treatment area, NASA developed sensing technology for burn depth sensing, and Numerical Control (NC) programming to guide the surgical laser mounted on a robotic end effector. The high risk, high payoff aspects of this research are the technical challenge of being able to use the scan data, even with a surgeon's interaction, to determine the required treatment and laser energy levels, and once that is determined assure a constant stand off distance if the patient moves, however, the payoff is faster and less traumatic wound preparation. This also presents a new opportunity for designers and integrators of manufacturing automation equipment and systems.
