Packaging and evaluation of an online tool for locating metal shrapnel during surgery

A major cause of death in victims of bomb blast, land mines and gunfire is injury due to metal shrapnel. The present approach adopted by doctors to recover these metal shrapnel is to locate them via X-ray/CT images before surgery and then cut open the located area for their removal. But this approach is not always successful as there were cases in which the shrapnel was visible clearly in the images, but during surgery the doctors could not trace it. Hence based on a clinical requirement, a minimally invasive online probe was developed to guide doctors to the location of the shrapnel during surgery. The sensor used in the probe was a miniaturized Inductive Proximity Sensor which was powered using a novel excitation. In this paper, the packaging of this shrapnel detecting probe into a new online tool and its evaluation in a surgery-like scenario is presented. Some errors were found during the various stages of evaluation and these were corrected using suitable corrective measures. The details of these corrective measures are also presented in this paper.