MIT 2.75 Engineering Medical Devices Overview

With the goal of engaging graduate students and accelerating ideas into prototypes, teams of MIT graduate engineering students spend a semester collaborating with clinicians in CIMIT-affiliated hospitals to develop innovative medical devices. Clinicians (physicians, nurses, and scientists) present clinical problems and initial ideas. Students form teams to work with the clinicians to turn these ideas into reality. The goal is for the students to deliver a working prototype and a journal-quality article in one semester. In its fifth year, the course has been a great opportunity for clinicians to test out new ideas and to stimulate new collaborations. For example, Robopsy, a robotic device to assist radiologists performing tumor biopsies was invented by an MIT team led by Rajiv Gupta, MD, in 2004. The team was awarded the 2007 MIT $100K prize, the world's leading entrepreneurship competition and the 2008 ASME Innovation Showcase. Join us to hear from the teams of 2008.

Forum Summary

Catheters are used in many medical procedures, and they often need to be positioned in poorly constrained spaces outside the vasculature.  Positioning a traditional catheter in such a space is often a challenge and can be compared to the task of pushing a soft noodle from one end in order to position the other end.  A number of medical procedures would be easier to perform with a catheter capable of maintaining its overall shape while the position of its tip was adjusted.  This new type of catheter would need to be biocompatible and safe for patients, requiring no electricity and producing no heat, and it would also need to be compatible with imaging modalities such as fluoroscopy and ultrasound while being no more than 3 mm in diameter.

A team of MIT students, working with Rajiv Gupta, MD, PhD, have designed a catheter to meet these functional requirements.  Theirs is a double-lumen catheter with two guide wires, and each guide wire is composed of interlocking beads with spherical bearing surfaces.  Each guide wire is rigid when its beads are held in tension but becomes pliant when the tension is released.  The catheter is controlled by advancing one guide wire while keeping the other rigid.  When the leading guide wire is appropriately positioned, tension is applied so that it becomes rigid, and then the second guide wire advanced to match the first.  Thus, the second guide wire locks the overall shape of the catheter while the first guide wire is used to advance the tip.  The team of students from MIT mathematically modeled the forces acting on their catheter in order to ensure that their design is scalable.   

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