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Undue heat production in surgical bone drilling leads to osteonecrosis and can be an important cause of failure of osteosynthesis, impaired healing, and loosening of implants following orthopedic surgery. The present work aims to minimize heat production below the critical temperature for thermal osteonecrosis (i.e., 47°C) and obviate thermal bone damage due to drilling. A total of 20 samples from the shaft of the human femur were obtained at autopsies and drilling was performed at room temperature by an operation theater (OT) compatible rotary ultrasonic bone drilling (RUBD) machine. K‐type thermocouples were used to measure the temperature rise during drilling and the physical changes of the bone samples were observed by infrared gama camera. Light microscopic and transmission electron microscopic studies were performed to evaluate the bone cell damage. The maximum temperature recorded in RUBD (40.6 ± 1.3°C) was much below the critical temperature for thermal osteonecrosis (p <.05) at the rotational speed of 2000 rpm. Light microscopic and ultrastructural studies also revealed that there was no appreciable damage to the bone cells. Conventional bone drilling (CD) on the other hand recorded much higher temperature (66.6 ± 3.2°C), tissue burn and bone cell necrosis. Hence, RUBD machine has a potentiality for its use in orthopedic surgery and may provide better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Novel operation theatre compatible machine was developed which works on principle of rotary ultrasonic bone drilling (RUBD) process. • RUBD produced comparatively lesser temperature rise (from 13.1 °C to 25.8 °C) than CSBD (34 °C to 45 °C) during drilling of hard tibia bones. • Design of experiment based response surface methodology was used to plan the set of experiments to study the effect of drilling parameters on temperature rise in RUBD process. • Regression equation has been used to develop the statistical model to predict the temperature rise at the bone tool interface, and the drilling parameters (rotational speed, feed rate, drill tool diameter and abrasive size) are determined for minimum temperature rise. Temperature rise in surgical bone drilling is an important factor that leads to death of the bone cells, known as Osteonecrosis, and results into poor osteosynthesis i.e. implant failure. The present work aims to study the temperature rise during bone drilling by a recently developed operation theatre (OT) compatible machine. The temperature during the drilling process was recorded from K-type thermocouple devices, which were embedded in the human tibial bone at four different positions (at 0.5 mm, 1.0 mm, 1.5 mm, and 2.0 mm) from the drilling site. Comparative study revealed that rotary ultrasonic bone drilling (RUBD) technique produced lesser temperature (40 – 50%) than conventional drilling on human tibia. Statistical model was developed to predict the temperature rise in RUBD process using response surface methodology (RSM), and the optimum parameters were determined using Genetic Algorithm. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was carried out at a confidence interval of 95 percent (α = 0.05) to determine the influence of various drilling parameters such as rotational speed, feed rate, drill diameter and abrasive particle size on temperature rise. It was observed that the rotational speed was responsible for the maximum temperature rise (51.8%) followed by drill diameter (18.8%), and abrasive particle size (14.3%); whereas, the feed rate contributed minimal (4%) temperature rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]