Audio monitoring of bone cement disintegration in pulsating fluid jet surgery under laboratory conditions

Abstract

This study investigates a pulsating fluid jet as a precise, minimally invasive and cold technique for bone cement removal. We utilize the pulsating fluid jet device to remove bone cement from samples designed to mimic clinical conditions. The effectiveness of a novel in-house designed long nozzle was tested to enable minimally invasive procedures. Audio signal monitoring, complemented by our introduced novel data correlation algorithm S4D-Bio, was employed to address challenges like visibility obstruction from splashing. The experiments aim to evaluate the effectiveness of our novel in-house designed long nozzle for minimally invasive removal of bone cement using a pulsating fluid jet as well as the prediction accuracy of the erosion rate. Within our experiments, we generate a comprehensive dataset of erosion profiles and their equivalent audio signals and make it available open-source. The use of SSMs yields experimentally demonstrated precise control over the predictive erosion process with a prediction accuracy of 98.93%. The study also demonstrates, that the pulsating fluid jet device, coupled with advanced audio monitoring techniques, is a highly effective cyber-physical system for estimating erosion depth under controlled conditions. On the other hand, this study presents the first application of SSMs in pulsating fluidjet surgery technology, marking a significant novelty. This research introduces the components of a future system for minimally invasive, cold and adaptive bone cement removal in orthopedic applications.