Westwick, David T.Sutherland, Garnette R.L'Orsa, Rachael2024-11-262024-11-262024-11-21L'Orsa, R. (2024). Data-driven needle puncture detection for the delivery of urgent medical care in space (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.https://hdl.handle.net/1880/120092Needle thoracostomy (NT) is a surgical procedure that treats one of the most preventable causes of trauma-related death: dangerous accumulations of air between the chest wall and the lungs. However, needle-tip overshoot of the target space can result in the inadvertent puncture of critical structures like the heart. This type of complication is fatal without urgent surgical care, which is not available in resource-poor environments like space. Since NT is done blind, operators rely on tool sensations to identify when the needle has reached its target. Needle instrumentation could enable puncture notifications to help operators limit tool-tip overshoot, but such a solution requires reliable puncture detection from manual (i.e., variable-velocity) needle insertion data streams. Data-driven puncture-detection (DDPD) algorithms are appropriate for this application, but their performance has historically been unacceptably low for use in safety-critical applications. This work contributes towards the development of an intelligent device for manual NT assistance by proposing two novel DDPD algorithms. Three data sets are collected that provide needle forces and displacements acquired during insertions into ex vivo porcine tissue analogs for the human chest, and factors affecting DDPD algorithm performance are analyzed in these data. Puncture event features are examined for each sensor, and the suitability of both accelerometer measurements and diffuse reflectance measurements are evaluated within the context of NT. Finally, DDPD ensembles are proposed that yield a 5.1-fold improvement in precision as compared to the traditional force-only DDPD approach. These results lay a foundation for improving the urgent delivery of percutaneous procedures in space and other resource-poor settings.enUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Emergency medicineNeedle thoracostomyData-driven puncture detectionSignal processingOptimizationNeedle instrumentationEngineering--Electronics and ElectricalMedicine and Surgerydoctoral thesis