Burr wear detection based on vibration sense during surgical milling

One of major challenges in bone cutting surgery is replacing the cutting tool at the right time. This paper develops a burr wear detection method through analyzing the acceleration signal of the operation power device. Wavelet packet decomposition is used to separate the noise and the harmonic whose frequency is an integer times of the spindle frequency of the operation power device. The energy ratio of the harmonic by the noise is calculated and then used as a sensitive indicator to burr wear. To verify the effectiveness of the method, milling experiments are carried out on porcine spines. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is simple and effective enough for real-time implementation.