Publications

Laser photocoagulation is one of the most frequently used treatment approaches in ophthalmology for a variety of retinal diseases. Depending on indication, treatment intensity varies from application of specific micro injuries down to gentle temperature increases without inducing cell damage. Especially for the latter, proper energy dosing is still a challenging issue, which mostly relies on the physician's experience. Pulsed laser photoacoustic temperature measurement has already proven its ability for automated irradiation control during laser treatment but suffers from a comparatively high instrumental effort due to combination with a conventional continuous wave treatment laser. In this paper, a simplified setup with a single pulsed laser at 10 kHz repetition rate is presented. The setup combines the instrumentation for treatment as well as temperature measurement and control in a single device. In order to compare the solely pulsed heating with continuous wave (cw) tissue heating, pulse energies of 4 [my]J were applied with a repetition rate of 1 kHz to probe the temperature rise, respectively. With the same average laser power of 60 mW an almost identical temporal temperature course was retrieved in both irradiation modes as expected. The ability to reach and maintain a chosen aim temperature of 41 ˚C is demonstrated by means of model predictive control (MPC) and extended Kalman filtering at a the measurement rate of 250 Hz with an accuracy of less than ±0.1 ˚C. A major advantage of optimization-based control techniques like MPC is their capability of rigorously ensuring constraints, e.g., temperature limits, and thus, realizing a more reliable and secure temperature control during retinal laser irradiation.

We present an approach for state and parameter estimation in retinal laser treatment by a novel setup where both measurement and heating is performed by a single laser. In this medical application, the temperature that is induced by the laser in the patients eye is critical for a successful and safe treatment. To this end, we pursue a model-based approach using a model given by a heat diffusion equation on a cylindrical domain, where the source term is given by the absorbed laser power. The model is parametric in the sense that it involves an absorption coefficient, which depends on the treatment spot and plays a central role in the input-output behavior of the system. After discretization, we apply a particularly suited parametric model order reduction to ensure real-time tractability while retaining parameter dependence. We augment known state estimation techniques, i.e., extended Kalman filtering and moving horizon estimation, with parameter estimation to estimate the absorption coefficient and the current state of the system. Eventually, we show first results for simulated and experimental data from porcine eyes. We find that, regarding convergence speed, the moving horizon estimation slightly outperforms the extended Kalman filter on measurement data in terms of parameter and state estimation, however, on simulated data the results are very similar.

We derive sufficient conditions for strict dissipativity for optimal control of linear evolution equations on Hilbert spaces with a cost functional including linear and quadratic terms. We show that strict dissipativity with a particular storage function is equivalent to ellipticity of a Lyapunov-like operator. Further we prove under a spectral decomposition assumption of the underlying generator and an orthogonality condition of the resulting subspaces that this ellipticity property holds under a detectability assumption. We illustrate our result by means of an example involving a heat equation on a one-dimensional domain.

LiCoO2 (LCO) is the most successful commercial cathode for lithium-ion batteries due to its high theoretical specific capacity (274 mA h g^-1). However, LCO-based batteries show a significantly high degree of instability in cycling performance and severe capacity fading as voltages exceed 4.35 V versus Li/Li+. Herein, a carbon nanotube macrofilm (CMF) was used as a current collector for addressing the long-standing issues, which demonstrate LCO with the first specific capacities of 191.1 and 180.1 mA h g^-1 after 300 cycles, at 4.5 V. The excellent results are ascribed to the interactions between decomposed electrolytes and carbon nanotubes, which ensure that decomposition products around the cathode are cleaned timely by the current collector cleaner. Therefore an ultrathin cathode electrolyte interphase is obtained and keeps the feature in the subsequent cycles. The assembled LCO-based pouch cell also indicates a high energy density of 523 W h kg^-1 after 200 cycles. This work presents novel insights into cathodes with stable cycling at high voltages.