Characterisation of manual drilling of human bone

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.Master of Science (Precision Engineering