Model predictive control for retinal laser treatment at 1 kHz

TL;DR

This paper develops a real-time Model Predictive Control approach at 1 kHz for retinal laser treatment, ensuring safety by managing peak temperature despite tissue variability, validated through simulations and porcine eye experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a tailored MPC scheme with model reduction and estimation techniques for fast, safe retinal laser therapy at high repetition rates.

Findings

MPC effectively maintains temperature bounds during treatment.

The approach is validated in simulation and porcine eye experiments.

Implementation details enable real-time computation at 1 kHz.

Abstract

Laser photocoagulation is a technique applied in the treatment of retinal diseases. While this is often done manually or using simple control schemes, we pursue an optimization-based approach, namely Model Predictive Control (MPC), to enforce bounds on the peak temperature and, thus, safety during the medical treatment procedure - despite the spot-dependent absorption of the tissue. To this end, a repetition rate of 1 kHz is desirable rendering the real-time requirements a major challenge. We present a tailored MPC scheme using parametric model reduction, an extended Kalman filter for the parameter and state estimation, and suitably constructed stage costs and verify its applicability both in simulation and experiments with porcine eyes. Moreover, we give some insight on the implementation specifically tailored for fast numerical computations.