Development of an intelligent surgical instrument for otitis media with effusion.

To treat a worldwide common ear disease (OME), a device allowing fast grommet tube insertion has been designed in our earlier works (Gao et al., 2015 [1] and Liang et al., 2013 [2]). However, the instrument has to be manually placed as close as to the Tympanic Membrane before the insertion procedures. To realize a fully automated surgical process, the instrument shall be automatically manipulated to align to the axial direction of ear canal and proceed to complete the surgery. A vision-based servomechanism is proposed to solve the path planning problem. A fuzzy-gain-scheduled controller is proposed to minimize the projection error based on the image detection and the proximity measurement. The proposed controller is proven to outperform the traditional PI controller in pre-clinical trials.