A GMR sensor based guiding tool for location of metal shrapnel during surgery

Shrapnel injury is a major cause of death in victims of bomb blast, land mines and gun fire. In this paper, a Giant Magneto Resistance (GMR) sensor based online surgical tool that helps to remove metal shrapnel from victim's body is presented. This tool is intended to guide the surgeon to the exact location of the shrapnel during surgery. Presently doctors rely on imaging systems to locate them before surgery. Effectiveness of surgery solely depends on the doctors' skill to trace them, as these images do not provide real-time information of the location of the shrapnel during surgery. Therefore, in some cases, the shrapnel, in spite of being visible in the images, may become untraceable during surgery. So in such cases, a sensing tool that can guide the doctor to the location of the shrapnel will be very effective. An inductive proximity sensor can serve this purpose, but its output can be affected by its lead inductance or other parasitic circuit parameters. Therefore in order to overcome such effects, a GMR based sensing tool is proposed here. The details and experimental results obtained from this tool are presented in this paper. The tool can detect both ferromagnetic and paramagnetic metal targets.