Characterisation of manual drilling of human bone

Abstract

DriIIing of human bones for orthopaedic surgery has been one of the

extensive research areas for ages. Doctors have been using manual surgical drilling

machines popularly in order to drill into the human bones. Even though earlier

researches were mainly focussed on automatic bone drilling operation, there is

hardly any research on manual drilling operation of human bones. Drilling into

human bones manually is not an easier task when compared to drilling manually

into metals and other components due to the irregular layer structure of human

bones. In particular, tibia and fibula bones are made up of two concentric layers

which are largely differ in structure. There are lot of factors like forces exerted on

the bone, vibrations from the drilling machine and sound from the drill bit and bone

interaction experienced by the surgeon, etc. which contribute to the precise and

accurate drilling of the human bone. An environment similar to where a surgeon

drills a human bone manually is created and factors such as forces, acceleration and

sound are study and compared at various instances of operation and at various

layers of the bone structure. Comparison of these factors are also made between

different individual drilling data in order to examine any resemblance or difference

between the individual signatures which will largely help interns surgeons and

future surgeons to understand the drilling operation in response with the above said

factors and thereby minimalize the failure rates of human bone drilling.