Proposta de abordagem para determinação de potência ativa em unidade eletrocirúrgica

Abstract

Despite of more than a hundred years of electrosurgery, regulation of active power to be delivered to the body tissue is still an engineering challenge. Few electrosurgical equipment manufacturers have developed methods to regulate active power. Those who did, just roughly adjust the power to be delivered around a predefined setpoint. In fact, a manufacturer with a process to measure the active power actually delivered to the load could not be evidenced. This can be verified by the fact that there is still no instrumentation in the market capable of satisfying the regulatory requirement - item 201.7.4.2 of the NBR standard NBR IEC 60.601.2-2 Equipamento eletromédico Parte 2-2: Prescrições particulares para segurança do equipamento cirúrgico de alta frequência - that prohibits presenting in the equipment panel the power value in watts unless such power is delivered with an accuracy of ± 20 % over the full load resistance range. Not knowing the active power can cause burns and damage the tissue, which receives more power than necessary. The challenge is to measure voltage and current and calculate power fast enough to prevent tissue carbonization. This paper presents an approach to calculate active power in order to address the described problem and shows the setup for measuring used. The process is based on the mathematical interpretation of active power, determined by known voltage and current. It has been shown that the process consists of ordinary mathematical calculations based on simple multiplication process of variables discretized in the frequency domain obtained through the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) applied to the vectors of voltage and current sampled in time. The proposed calculation method is performed close to 4 ms, six times faster than 25 ms initially stipulated to avoid carbonization of the tissue(Appendix A). Simulations and practical ablation experiments have been performed and compared to validate the proposed method. The determination of active power delivered by a commercial electrosurgical unit using the proposed method has been performed and compared to manufacturer's power data. The highest discrepancies lie in the tests with no sparking. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the proposed approach can assess whether the delivery results by the equipment are within the required regulatory standards. Furthermore, a model of sparking space has been presented, valid for cutting, coagulation and blend curves, allowing the study of voltage and current on the load. This model links the appearance of the DC value to current or voltage, depending of the output circuit, to the sparking presented by the surgical procedures. This fact is disregarded in the processes of electromedical equipment certification, which only considers situations with ohmic contacts.