Stories about: Devices

From clinician to clinician-innovator: Designing a surgical innovation fellowship

Posted on by Gabriel Ramos, MD
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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Ramos at Boston Children’s Hospital’s 3D printing facility (Photos: Katherine C. Cohen/Boston Children’s)

Gabriel Ramos, MD, is a second-year general surgery resident from Puerto Rico, is Boston Children’s Hospital’s first Surgical Innovation Fellow.

I have devoted considerable time and training to become a surgeon. But I recently took a detour from my surgical education to pursue a research fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. I originally applied for a basic science research fellowship, but Dr. Heung Bae Kim – director of the Pediatric Transplant Center at Boston Children’s — described a new Surgical Innovation Fellowship. I decided to apply.

The early-stage nature of the fellowship meant I would not only learn about healthcare innovation, but also shape its future at Boston Children’s Hospital. The idea of learning more about the intersection of innovation, business and surgery was fascinating to me.

I was about to stop thinking as a surgeon – and start thinking as an innovator. …

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From idea to product: 6 tips for surgical innovators

Posted on by Gabriel Ramos, MD
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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surgical innovation tips

Gabriel Ramos, MD, is a second-year general surgery resident from Puerto Rico and Boston Children’s Hospital’s first Surgical Innovation Fellow.

Learning how to think like a clinician-innovator is a journey that all clinicians should take. But be forewarned that the journey does not end with developing this new mindset. It starts with it.

What does it take to sustain innovation both inside and outside of the operating room? As a surgical innovation fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, I learned to go back in time and immerse myself in the mindset of my toddler years, constantly asking “Why?” and “What if…?” This mindset is critical to sustaining innovation and solving clinical, research or administrative pain points.

Often, the hardest part of innovation is coming up with the right idea. Numerous factors must align, especially in surgical innovation, since the typical operating room is a difficult, distracting and stressful environment. …

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Monitoring mitochondria: Laser device tells whether oxygen is sufficient

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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Shining a laser-based device on a tissue or organ may someday allow doctors to assess whether it’s getting enough oxygen, a team reports today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Placed near the heart, the device can potentially predict life-threatening cardiac arrest in critically ill heart patients, according to tests in animal models. The technology was developed through a collaboration between Boston Children’s Hospital and device maker Pendar Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.).

“With current technologies, we cannot predict when a patient’s heart will stop,” says John Kheir, MD, of Boston Children’s Heart Center, who co-led the study. “We can examine heart function on the echocardiogram and measure blood pressure, but until the last second, the heart can compensate quite well for low oxygen conditions. Once cardiac arrest occurs, its consequences can be life-long, even when patients recover.”

In critically ill patients with compromised circulation or breathing, oxygen delivery is often impaired. The new device measures, in real time, whether enough oxygen is reaching the mitochondria, the organelles that provide cells with energy. …

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Pediatric devices wanted: Boston Children’s Hospital and the Boston Pediatric Device Consortium launch $250,000 challenge

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation, Pediatrics
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Boston Pediatric Device Strategic Partner Challenge opens

There’s generally little incentive for industry to develop medical devices for children: The pediatric market is small (most children are healthy) and clinical trials are harder to do in children.

“Innovation in medical devices with the potential to improve the health of children and adolescents continues to lag in comparison to those for adults,” says Pedro del Nido, MD, leader of the Boston Pediatric Device Consortium and Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. 

This week, the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Boston Pediatric Device Consortium (BPDC) announced a national challenge to try to remedy this problem. The Boston Pediatric Device Strategic Partner Challenge will award up to $50,000 to entrepreneurs and innovators seeking to create novel pediatric medical devices, from a total pool of up to $250,000. …

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“Shapeshifter” that regulates blood clotting is visually captured for the first time

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Devices, Science
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GIF of VWF, which regulates blood clotting, elongating and relaxing on loop
A single molecule of von Willebrand factor is visually captured, as it elongates and relaxes in response to blood flow conditions, for the very first time. Credit: Springer/Wong labs (Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School)

We are normally born with a highly sophisticated array of molecules that act as “sentries,” constantly scanning our bodies for injuries such as cuts and bruises. One such molecular sentry, known as von Willebrand factor (VWF), plays a critical role in our body’s ability to stop bleeding.

To prevent hemorrhage or life-threatening blood clots, VWF must strike a delicate balance between clotting too little or too much. Researchers have long suspected that the mechanical forces and shear stress of blood flow could be closely-related to VWF’s function.

“In some ways, like in the movie Star Wars, VWF may be considered a Jedi knight in our body that can use ‘the force’ to guard the bloodstream,” says Timothy Springer, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School (HMS).

It has not been possible to witness exactly how VWF senses and harnesses these mechanical forces — until now. …

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Pediatric heart surgeons eye sticky, stretchy, slug-inspired adhesive

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices
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Arion subfiscus, whose sticky mucus inspired the new surgical adhesive (H. Crisp/Wikimedia Commons)

It’s been a challenge to develop a surgical adhesive that sticks to wet surfaces and isn’t toxic. But it turns out a certain kind of slug is very good at secreting a sticky mucus that glues fast, apparently as a defense mechanism.

That provided the inspiration for a hydrogel “super” adhesive that could supplant surgical sutures, at least for some operations, and help medical devices stay in place. Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), led by David Mooney, PhD, report that the adhesive bound strongly to a variety of animal tissues, including skin, cartilage, artery, liver and heart.

Nikolay Vasilyev, MD, a coauthor on the paper, is interested in the adhesive’s potential for young patients with congenital heart disease. He is is a research scientist in Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and led cardiac studies in pig models.  …

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Building emotional strength with Mighteor: Will’s story

Posted on by Greg Weintraub
Posted in Devices, Innovation

MIghteor

Will, a 13-year-old from Wisconsin, lives with high-functioning Asperger’s and faces difficulties recognizing and managing his emotions. He doesn’t like to talk about emotions he perceives as negative, and becomes upset when he doesn’t meet the high standards he sets for himself. These oachhallenges have made it difficult for Will to thrive in social situations.

Karen immediately began researching strategies, as many as she could find, to help Will manage his emotions. She found a Social Thinking program, as well as ABA therapy, both of them important opportunities for Will to increase his “social batting average,” as Karen puts it.

However, Will soon became resistant to using the strategies offered by these programs. Cues to calm down through deep breathing, for example, tended to create more frustration and anger and did not decrease his swearing, frustration or oppositional behaviors. Despite his ongoing work with an ABA therapist and the Social Thinking program, his academics started to suffer and he sometimes had to leave the classroom. “He would miss class, and then miss homework, and it would circle out of control,” says Karen. …

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Robot-enhanced neurosurgery for nimbler seizure mapping

Posted on by Jessica Cerretani
Posted in Devices, Innovation, Market trends
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implanting electrodes for seizure monitoring, with robotic assistance
Scellig Stone and Joseph Madsen in surgery with the robot.

Head shaved, a little boy rests on the operating table, deep under anesthesia. His parents have brought him to Boston Children’s Hospital in hopes of determining the cause of his seizures. Now, neurosurgeons Scellig Stone, MD, PhD, Joseph Madsen, MD, and their colleagues in the Epilepsy Center are performing a procedure designed to monitor seizure activity in the 3-year-old’s brain.

But as the team members crowd around the table, they’re not alone. With the push of a button, a large robotic arm rotates and lowers right next to the boy’s head, helping the physicians pinpoint the precise location to drill. “This is a real game-changer,” murmurs one of the clinicians observing the surgery. “It’s going to transform the way we practice.” …

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Training neurosurgeons in a rare hydrocephalus procedure, with a little help from Hollywood

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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ETV trainer

A 4-year-old has a progressively enlarging head and loss of developmental milestones: a clear case of hydrocephalus. He undergoes a minimally invasive endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) to drain off the trapped cerebrospinal fluid.

This requires puncturing the floor of the brain’s third ventricle (fluid-filled cavity) with an endoscope — while avoiding a lethal tear in the basilar artery, which lies perilously close.

There are no good neurosurgical training models for this rare and scary operation.

“We semi-blindly poke a hole through the ventricle floor,” says Benjamin Warf, MD, director of Neonatal and Congenital Anomaly Neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. “To make the technique safer and to be able to train more people, it would be very helpful to make that hole in a way that’s less anxiety-provoking.” …

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Predicting influenza outbreaks faster with a digitally-empowered wearable device

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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Influenza viruses. Outbreaks can be predicted using digital health tools like Thermia.The Thermia online health educational tool, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, has enabled one-month-faster prediction of seasonal influenza outbreaks in China, via its digital integration with a commercially-available wearable thermometer. The findings appear in a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

 “The fact that we were able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than China’s national surveillance programs really shows the capacity for everyday, wearable digital health devices to track the spread of disease at the population level,” says the study’s lead author Yulin Hswen, who is a research fellow in Boston Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

China has 620 million mobile internet users who can theoretically access the standalone Thermia application from any computer, smartphone or even the Amazon Alexa assistant.

Although the Boston Children’s team has previously demonstrated that social media can be used to track disease, this is the first time they’ve shown that outbreaks can be predicted through an integrated wearable device and online tool. …

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