Blood Vessel Recognition Project (ENGR 110, Spring 2009)
Students: Shereen Elserougi, Mehana Hoopii, Margaret Howe
Advisor: Shoba Krishnan
Students worked to enhance technologies used on the PlasmaBlade, a scalpel that integrates precision with bleeding control of traditional electrosurgical methods. The developers wanted to provide some sort of “visual” feedback to the surgeon on the size and proximity of nearby blood vessels. The students began work characterizing the physical system. They determined the project scope was too much to be completed in one quarter and chose to continue this project as their capstone project next year. They divided the project into 5 sections – physical model, pump probe, common mode noise discrimination, mathematical model, signal interpretation. Over the summer, students planned to continue working on the physical model and begin work on the pump probe.