Patent ID: 9600880
Date: 2017-03-21
CPC Classifications: A61B,G02B,G06T

Claim:
1. A method of qualifying a surgical clip applier to be implemented by a system, the surgical clip applier being loaded with a plurality of surgical clips and having a working tip, the system including an image capture unit, a rotatable clip-receiving disk, a driving unit and a processing unit, the clip-receiving disk being disposed under the image capture unit and formed with a plurality of angularly equidistant radial recesses, said method comprising the steps of: a) by the driving unit, driving, in response to a firing operation of the surgical clip applier, the clip-receiving disk to rotate in a manner that one of the radial recesses adjacent to the working tip of the surgical clip applier moves to be aligned with the working tip of the surgical clip applier so as to receive anything ejected from the working tip of the surgical clip applier due to the firing operation of the surgical clip applier; b) after said one of the radial recesses moves away from the working tip of the surgical clip applier, capturing, by the image capture unit, a sampling image associated with said one of the radial recesses; c) repeating steps a) and b) until a number (N) of the sampling images have been captured by the image capture unit, where the number (N) is not greater than the number of the surgical clips loaded in the surgical clip applier and the number of the radial recesses in the clip-receiving disk; e) determining, by the processing unit, whether each of the sampling images contains only one individual target image portion snowing a single surgical clip ejected from the working tip of the surgical clip applier and received in a respective one of the radial recesses in the clip-receiving disk; e) upon determining that each of the sampling images contains the individual target image portion, obtaining, by the processing unit, from the individual target image portion of each of the sampling images, a characteristic parameter that is associated with the surgical clip received in the respective one of the radial recesses; and f) verifying, by the processing unit, the qualification of the surgical clip applier based on a predetermined specification and the characteristic parameters, which are obtained respectively from the target image portions of the sampling images.