Ultrasonic Aspirator for Tissue Contact Detection: An Online Classification on Time-Series

The goal of neurosurgical tumor surgery is to remove the tumor completely without damaging healthy brain structures and thereby impairing the patient's neurological functions. This requires careful planning and execution of the operation by experienced neurosurgeons using the latest intraoperative technologies to achieve safe and rapid tumor reduction without harming the patient. To achieve this goal, a standard ultrasonic aspirator designed for tissue removal is equipped with additional intraoperative tissue detection using machine learning methods.Since decision-making in a clinical context must be fast, online contact detection is critical. Data are generated on three types of artificial tissue models in a CNC machine-controlled environment with four different ultrasonic aspirator settings. Contact classification on artificial tissue models is evaluated on four classification algorithms: change point detection (CPD), random forest (RF), recurrent neural network (RNN) and temporal convolutional network (TCN). Data preprocessing steps are applied, and their impacts are investigated. All methods are evaluated on five-fold cross-validation and provide generally good results with a performance of up to 0.977±0.007 in mean F1-score. Preprocessing the data has a positive effect on the classification processes for all methods and consistently improves the metrics. Thus, this work indicates in a first step that contact classification is feasible in an online context for an ultrasonic aspirator. Further research is necessary on different tissue types, as well as hand-held use to more closely resemble the intraoperative clinical conditions.