Qurrat Ul Ain

Zunaira Shafqat, Atif Aftab Ahmed Jilani, Qurrat Ul Ain

In the dynamic landscape of modern healthcare, maintaining the highest standards in surgical instruments is critical for clinical success. This report explores the diverse realm of surgical instruments and their associated manufacturing defects, emphasizing their pivotal role in ensuring the safety of surgical procedures. With potentially fatal consequences arising from even minor defects, precision in manufacturing is paramount.The report addresses the identification and rectification of critical defects such as cracks, rust, and structural irregularities. Such scrutiny prevents substantial financial losses for manufacturers and, more crucially, safeguards patient lives. The collaboration with industry leaders Daddy D Pro and Dr. Frigz International, renowned trailblazers in the Sialkot surgical cluster, provides invaluable insights into the analysis of defects in Pakistani-made instruments. This partnership signifies a commitment to advancing automated defect detection methodologies, specifically through the integration of deep learning architectures including YOLOv8, ResNet-152, and EfficientNet-b4, thereby elevating quality standards in the manufacturing process. The scope of this report is to identify various surgical instruments manufactured in Pakistan and analyze their associated defects using a newly developed dataset of 4,414 high-resolution images. By focusing on quality assurance through Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) tools, this document serves as a resource for manufacturers, healthcare professionals, and regulatory bodies. The insights gained contribute to the enhancement of instrument standards, ensuring a more reliable healthcare environment through industry expertise and cutting-edge technology.

Qurrat Ul Ain, Atif Aftab Ahmed Jilani, Zunaira Shafqat et al.

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.

Harshdeep Singh, Nicholas McCarthy, Qurrat Ul Ain et al.

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.