A High-Frequency Ultrasound Endoscope for Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transition to minimally invasive spinal surgery over traditional open procedures requires the development of imaging techniques that meet the size constraints. Due to size restrictions associated with minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS), current imaging techniques are largely limited to microscopy, which is only capable of line-of-sight imaging of the tissue surface. A miniature, high-resolution ultrasound imaging endoscope has been developed as a potential alternative imaging method that would enable intraoperative guidance. We have designed and developed a 30-MHz miniature, 64-element high-resolution imaging endoscope using PIN-PMT-PT single crystal as the piezoelectric substrate. The packaged probe had cross-sectional dimensions of $3.8\times 4.2$ mm and a length of 14 cm. Two editions of the endoscope were created with a forward facing and 40° angle to enable visualization of structures during a medial and lateral approach, respectively. The probe was combined with a custom imaging system that produced real-time images with a field of view ranging between ±32° and an image depth of 15 mm. The two-way axial resolution was measured to be $38~\mu $ m based on the -6-dB width of the pulse envelope. The -6-dB lateral resolution was measured to be 113, 131, and $158~\mu $ m at steering angles of 0°, 12°, and 25°, respectively, which were close to the simulated values of 106, 118, and $144~\mu $ m. Preliminary clinical imaging studies successfully demonstrated the visualization of pertinent spinal anatomy during minimally invasive surgeries. The imaging probe was also able to demonstrate compression and decompression of nerve roots, supporting its potential use as a clinical tool.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".