Smart sensor for guiding safe delivery of anesthetic and pain drugs through epidurals

A smart optical probe that enables in vivo tissue type identification and the measurement of the force applied to the needle during epidural procedures is presented. This probe is meant to reduce the adverse risk associated with needle misplacement. It combines a Bragg sensor with low coherence interferometry (LCI) to measure the force applied by the operator on the standard epidural needle and differentiate tissue type presented at the tip of the epidural needle. The probe enables differentiation between different layers of tissue in the spinal region by making use of a machine-learning algorithm, which was trained on animal spinal cord tissue specimens.