Real-Time Surgical Instrument Defect Detection via Non-Destructive Testing

Defective surgical instruments pose serious risks to sterility, mechanical integrity, and patient safety, increasing the likelihood of surgical complications. However, quality control in surgical instrument manufacturing often relies on manual inspection, which is prone to human error and inconsistency. This study introduces SurgScan, an AI-powered defect detection framework for surgical instruments. Using YOLOv8, SurgScan classifies defects in real-time, ensuring high accuracy and industrial scalability. The model is trained on a high-resolution dataset of 102,876 images, covering 11 instrument types and five major defect categories. Extensive evaluation against state-of-the-art CNN architectures confirms that SurgScan achieves the highest accuracy (99.3%) with real-time inference speeds of 4.2-5.8 ms per image, making it suitable for industrial deployment. Statistical analysis demonstrates that contrast-enhanced preprocessing significantly improves defect detection, addressing key limitations in visual inspection. SurgScan provides a scalable, cost-effective AI solution for automated quality control, reducing reliance on manual inspection while ensuring compliance with ISO 13485 and FDA standards, paving the way for enhanced defect detection in medical manufacturing.

Efficient Test Data Generation for MC/DC with OCL and Search

System-level testing of avionics software systems requires compliance with different international safety standards such as DO-178C. An important consideration of the avionics industry is automated test data generation according to the criteria suggested by safety standards. One of the recommended criteria by DO-178C is the modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) criterion. The current model-based test data generation approaches use constraints written in Object Constraint Language (OCL), and apply search techniques to generate test data. These approaches either do not support MC/DC criterion or suffer from performance issues while generating test data for large-scale avionics systems. In this paper, we propose an effective way to automate MC/DC test data generation during model-based testing. We develop a strategy that utilizes case-based reasoning (CBR) and range reduction heuristics designed to solve MC/DC-tailored OCL constraints. We performed an empirical study to compare our proposed strategy for MC/DC test data generation using CBR, range reduction, both CBR and range reduction, with an original search algorithm, and random search. We also empirically compared our strategy with existing constraint-solving approaches. The results show that both CBR and range reduction for MC/DC test data generation outperform the baseline approach. Moreover, the combination of both CBR and range reduction for MC/DC test data generation is an effective approach compared to existing constraint solvers.