Bone Reconstruction and Depth Control During Laser Ablation

摘要

Cutting bones using laser light has been studied by several groups over the last decades. Yet, the risk of cutting nerves or soft tissues behind the bone is still an untackled problem. When performing tissue ablation such as bone, an acoustic signal is emitted. This paper presents a numerical framework that takes advantage of this acoustic signal to reconstruct not only the structure of the bone but also estimates the current cut position and depth. We employ an inverse problems approach to estimate the bone structure followed by an optimal control step to localize the position and depth of the signal source, i.e. the position of the cut. Besides the methodological description we also present numerical simulations in two dimensions with realistic mixed soft- and hard-tissue objects.