Electronic Suture Diagrams

Inspiration

In surgery, surgeons are required to have very steady and precise hands that are in control of someone’s life; one slip up can be fatal. A fundamental skill that surgeons must learn is the art of suturing. There are multiple kinds of techniques that can be used in surgery such as a horizontal mattress suture or a simple interrupted suture. Surgeons learn these techniques in their intern or residency years.

What it does

It displays one of three different types of sutures based on the user input.

How we built it

This project was built with VIPO (i.e. Variables Input Process Output) and conditional statements of java.

Challenges we ran into

Our original plan was to create a prosthetic hand that could be programmed to do these precise and delicate sutures as long as the surgeon or OR nurses enters in the suture technique into the computer. Of course, we do not have the hardware or the 3D printer to create the hand, but instead, we decided to show how the suture techniques are done through simple Java programming. We also ran into some trouble with software to compile and run our code; not only did we not have access to a code compiler for the majority of the hackathon, we also had to try to fix errors we did not know how to fix, which we ended up not being able to fix either due to the unreliability of the alternative java compiler or incorrect code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we wrote a code related to reducing risks of surgery by taking advantage of the precision of technology.

What we learned

We learned about the proper way to use VIPO as well as how technology can be applied to real life situations

What's next for Electronic Suture Diagrams

The next step for Electronic Suture Diagrams would be to try and implement this code into a robot of some sort that would physically execute the code to make precise sutures during surgery.

Built With

• java