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.

ChemoVerse: Manifold traversal of latent spaces for novel molecule discovery

In order to design a more potent and effective chemical entity, it is essential to identify molecular structures with the desired chemical properties. Recent advances in generative models using neural networks and machine learning are being widely used by many emerging startups and researchers in this domain to design virtual libraries of drug-like compounds. Although these models can help a scientist to produce novel molecular structures rapidly, the challenge still exists in the intelligent exploration of the latent spaces of generative models, thereby reducing the randomness in the generative procedure. In this work we present a manifold traversal with heuristic search to explore the latent chemical space. Different heuristics and scores such as the Tanimoto coefficient, synthetic accessibility, binding activity, and QED drug-likeness can be incorporated to increase the validity and proximity for desired molecular properties of the generated molecules. For evaluating the manifold traversal exploration, we produce the latent chemical space using various generative models such as grammar variational autoencoders (with and without attention) as they deal with the randomized generation and validity of compounds. With this novel traversal method, we are able to find more unseen compounds and more specific regions to mine in the latent space. Finally, these components are brought together in a simple platform allowing users to perform search, visualization and selection of novel generated compounds.