Cater, John E.Suresh, VinodHadi Najafabadi, Hossein2023-06-282023-06-282023https://hdl.handle.net/2292/64427Pyrolysis of tissue during electrosurgery in laparoscopy generates surgical smoke, which can impair the surgeon’s vision and pose potential risks to the healthcare of operating room personnel and patient. This study aims to provide a better understanding of surgical smoke behaviour during laparoscopic surgery. This understanding is essential to estimate the hazardous effects of surgical smoke and design and implement efficient surgical smoke extraction methods. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed for fluid flow, heat, and mass transport during electrosurgery and insufflation flow inside a rectangular chamber. An experimental study was undertaken to obtain the unknown parameters used in the numerical simulation. The solutions provided new information about temperature, relative humidity, surgical smoke density, and the likely distribution of surgical smoke deposition during electrosurgery. The agreement between experimental and computational results demonstrated that the CFD model is able to capture the behaviour of surgical smoke as a function of time. Visual impairment in laparoscopy was estimated based on ‘surgical smoke obscuration’ using experimental sensor-based, numerical, and laparoscopic image analysis methods. The obscuration results predicted by different methods were compared. All methods demonstrated that obscuration inside the chamber increases exponentially during the electrosurgery period and decays exponentially with constant carbon dioxide insufflation. Higher flow rates lead to more rapid smoke evacuation and less obscuration. The effect of surgical smoke evacuation port selection on the visual impairment during laparoscopic cholecystectomy was investigated experimentally and numerically in a realistic geometry of the peritoneal cavity. It was found that evacuation port selection has a minor effect on the decay rate of obscuration during insufflation flow. This work showed that CFD can be used as a predictive tool for pre-operation planning of laparoscopic surgeries and to investigate staff exposure to surgical smoke, the deposition of particulate matter on the peritoneum surface, and visual impairment during electrosurgery. The proposed numerical method can compute the surgical smoke obscuration in numerous situations and surgical scenarios, which are not easily achievable using other methods. The numerical method does not require images of the surgical field and can provide detailed information on different variables of interest inside the abdomen.Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htmhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/Thesis2023-04-07Copyright: The authorhttp://purl.org/eprint/accessRights/OpenAccess