The large interest in utilising fibre Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) applications to replace conventional electrical tactile sensors has grown in the past few years. FBG strain sensors offer the advantages of optical fibre sensors, such as high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic noise, electrical passivity and chemical inertness, but are not limited by phase discontinuity or intensity fluctuations. FBG sensors feature a wavelength-encoding sensing signal that enables distributed sensing that utilises fewer connections. In addition, their flexibility and lightness allow easy insertion into needles and catheters, thus enabling localised measurements inside tissues and blood. Two types of FBG tactile sensors have been emphasised in the literature: single-point and array FBG tactile sensors. This paper describes the current design, development and research of the optical fibre tactile techniques that are based on FBGs to enhance the performance of MIS procedures in general. Providing MIS or microsurgery surgeons with accurate and precise measurements and control of the contact forces during tissues manipulation will benefit both surgeons and patients.

We report on the experimental results of the combination of unique auto-correlation properties of Golay complementary code and Hadamard matrix properties of standard simplex code. The combination of the two coding techniques results in improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of time domain multiplexed fiber Bragg grating (TDM-FBG) sensor for temperature measurement. Previously, we have analyzed the properties of both coding techniques when deployed separately in the TDM-FBG sensor. In this case, both coding techniques result in the same amount of SNR improvement for code length longer than 31 bits. In this paper, we demonstrate the combination and simultaneous deployment of the two techniques to measure multiple FBGs under room condition (25 • C) and 50 • C temperature. The two schemes combination results in remarkable improvement of SNR and still retains the original spatial property of the decoded FBG signals, confirming the successful deployment of the hybrid codes. From the measurement of two FBG sensors located after 16 km of fiber, the combination of 31 bits of simplex-and 64 bits of Golay codes has resulted in a total of 10.5 dB improvement of SNR.

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