The range of medical devices incorporating optical fibers has taken a slow technological growth, with the bulk of the industry focused on endoscopy and various methods of optical power delivery for cutting, dissecting, and ablating. These technologies utilize an optical fiber’s mechanism—the ability to guide light from one location to another.
Fiber sensing technologies offer significantly advanced functionality by utilizing their inherent sensitivity to temperature, strain, and pressure. During the last five years, the medical industry has taken significant steps to adapt historic fiber-optic sensing methods to enable them to be used within in vivo environments.
The main area for recent technological developments driving fiber sensors into the medical industry has focused on minimally invasive surgery (MIS). The benefits of MIS are now well-founded, encouraging surgical-tool manufacturers to invest their money in new technology developments to pioneer new MIS procedures or to further improve existing procedures. Three exciting recently developed fiber optic sensing technologies for MIS are focused on here: haptic feedback, 3D shape sensing, and pressure sensing.
By utilizing multiple FBGs or manipulating the FBG structure, it is possible to obtain a spatially distributed strain profile. Such FBGs can be applied along the length of a surgical tool to enable haptic feedback at the regions of most concern. A prime example of this is to add haptic sensing to a grasping tool, where both the grasping and spreading forces can be measured and fed back to the surgeon to indicate how tightly they are grasping or how much force they are applying to pry tissues apart.
Fiber optic 3D shape sensing has been developed by several commercial groups to enable a dramatic reduction in the need for prolonged exposure to the visualization methods, as the optical fiber can track itself in three dimensions and thus if laid within a catheter, can recreate the shape of the catheter. This technique relies on a mixture of FBG and fiber technology, where a very special fiber has been developed specifically for this application. Optical fibers also can be optimized to be sensitive to the hydrostatic pressures experienced within the body. These new applications are being opened up by a mixture of economic desire and technology development. Specialty optical-fiber manufacturers continue to pioneer new fiber designs that medical-device manufacturers can exploit. This enables a greater diversification of medical-device product ranges and opens up new procedures that were not previously possible with minimally invasive surgery.