Cephalomedullary Nail Wire Navigation Simulator
The topic of my masters thesis focused on creating and testing an evaluation system for scoring orthopedic residents repairing a hip fracture. One piece of that project was making a cephalomedullary nail simulation for the Iowa Simulation Solutions Wire Navigation Simulator.
For this project I designed and manufactured hardware that secured a Sawbones femur model and looked/felt realistic while still keeping within the constraints of the simulation platform.
One of the most critical and variable steps of a hip fracture repair is establishing the entry point on the greater trochanter. This task is performed freehand under fluoroscopic guidance. Our hypothesized evaluation metric for this task was called the swept area, which was defined by the area traveled by a K-wire between sequential fluoroscopic images. We tested resident surgeons with different levels of experience to compare differences in behaviors.
In testing, we found that regardless of experience level, residents that frequently made large corrective movements needed more time and images to establish their entry point. We also found that the senior residents were more accurate in finding the target entry point, but not necessarily more efficient.
You can read about this project in more detail in The Proceedings of the 2023 Design of Medical Devices Conference: Discovering patterns in orthopedic surgical resident behavior during a cephalomedullary nail procedure with a wire navigation simulator.
If you are interested in reading the rest of my thesis work, you can find it here!
Recent Work
My current work is still within the scope of orthopedic surgical evaluation, but now instead of analyzing fluoroscopic still shots, I’ve taken on the challenge of video analysis for knee arthroscopy. I’ve learned a lot about image processing for this task, and I am exploring applications for machine learning. I can speak about this more in-person, but cannot post anything online before the work is published.