BIOS Hot Topics: Light Delivery for Surgical Tools

Muyinatu Bell, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Laboratory, describes her team's novel light-delivery systems that attach to surgical tools to deliver light to surgical sites. She and her team have also developed acoustic beamforming algorithms that improve image quality using state-of-the-art deep learning methods applied directly to raw sensor data. These light delivery and acoustic beamforming methods hold promise for robotic tracking tasks, visualization and visual servoing of surgical tool tips, and assessment of relative distances between the surgical tool and nearby critical structures, such as major blood vessels and nerves.