Pain mitigation approach in office-based procedure: Case study

This paper discusses pain-related considerations when transforming an operation typically performed under general anesthesia in an operating room, to an office-based procedure by utilizing the automated Ventilation Tube Applicator (VTA). Literature showed that it is advantageous to keep the total procedure time to under 450ms and peak force to under 0.445N for pain mitigation and to minimize middle ear damage. Experiments were carried out to compare manual versus automated procedure and results showed that the automated procedure using VTA has some improvements over the manual one in terms of total time taken and total applied force. However, VTA's peak force is higher than desired. Hence, further optimization of the VTA's parameters is needed to achieve faster time and lower peak force. In-depth experiments were carried out using Taguchi's Design of Experiments to distinguish the contributing factors. Using multiple-objective optimization, the optimal parameters for VTA are found.