Abstract:
The elliptical excision is a basic cutaneous surgery commonly performed by physicians and that consists of drawing a spindle shape with pointed ends having a length-to-width ratio 3 - 4: 1 with 30° angles at each of the poles to avoid the dog-ear formation upon sew up. Physicians who perform such excisional procedures tend to estimate and visually mark the border of the cut making such a procedure inaccurate, thus resulting in either excessive or less cutting of the skin. We propose an automated device that provides a rapid and precise determination of the borders of the excision. In order to perform the required function, the device obtains a snapshot of the lesion, determines its area using image processing, computes the required area to be removed, and finally projects a light accordingly representing the desired elliptic shape. The device consists of three main subsystems: a camera, a processing module and a light system. The paper presents the detailed implementation of the device and the performance results. Copyright 2009 ACM.