Accessing CIMIT Engineering Resources

Offering a variety of technology and engineering resources for clinically-based innovators who seek technical expertise at each phase of the solution development cycle.

Consortium Institutions
CIMIT Facilitation
Technology Development and Prototype Development
Centers and Laboratories
Technology Implementation

Consortium Institutions

CIMIT offers access to eleven consortium institutions, including the world-class universities and engineering laboratories of MIT, Boston University, Northeastern University and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.  CIMIT Site Miners, Program Leaders and facilitators can help assess the most appropriate connections into the engineering community and help you find potential technical or technology collaborators.

MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861 as a “teaching laboratory,” to couple teaching and research and focus on real-world problems. This mission coupled with outreach to industry has enabled one of the most respected technology transfer engines in the country, as well as nurturing many research programs that focus on interdisciplinary research.

MIT is one of the four institutions that came together in 1998 to found CIMIT. In addition to the CIMIT-funded projects MIT researchers have pursued, CIMIT and MIT have been working together through guest faculty support of its Health Science and Technology Program to provide meaningful training in medical device development for graduate students.

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory is a Cambridge-based research and development laboratory with a wide range of capabilities including expertise in biomedical engineering.

As one of the four founding members of CIMIT in 1998, Draper Laboratory provides engineering expertise for projects ranging from operating room control to image guided therapy for diagnostics and blood systems for tissue engineered artificial organs.

Boston University
Boston University’s excellence in biomedical engineering has made it invaluable for furthering CIMIT’s efforts in medical device development and engineering in medical environments. BU School of Biomedical Engineering offers CIMIT investigators access to world-class biomedical research faculty while providing meaningful training in medical device development for graduate students through the CIMIT/BU graduate student engineering fellowship program. 

Northeastern University
Northeastern is a research university with a defining focus on use-inspired research and a strong record of collaboration with colleagues in the clinic and in industry. Grounded in its signature cooperative education program, or co-op, the University’s rapidly growing research enterprise engages the talents of its faculty and student body in developing solutions to real world problems. Northeastern’s research infrastructure includes six national research centers designated by federal agencies, including centers of excellence in sensing and imaging, translational nanomedicine, nanomanufacturing and healthcare systems engineering.

CIMIT Facilitation

Facilitation Leaders
CIMIT Facilitation Leaders are a core staff of experts who coach, support, and network in ways that facilitate success collaborations and help achieve real clinical impact. CIMIT Leaders and facilitators help find, fund and facilitate the formation of new collaborations, with am emphasis on facilitating translational research and in finding potential clinical collaborators for engineers and optimal engineering expertise for clinicians who seek to solve clinical problems.  

In-house Engineering Expertise
CIMIT offers access to “engineers in residence”, individuals who have experience in technical and functional engineering expertise.

Technology Development and Prototype Development

Medical Engineering Courses

Engineering Medical Devices at MIT
MIT 2.75 Precision Machine Design is a course collaboration engaging five MIT student engineering teams in defining a medical device problem and designing and building a prototype solution in one semester. The course has run four times, each year with a new cast of physicians and device challenges. Robopsy, a robotic device to assist radiologists performing tumor biopsies was invented by an MIT 2.75 team led by Rajiv Gupta, MD. The team has been awarded the 2007 MIT $100K prize, the world's leading entrepreneurship competition.

CIMIT has partnered with the MIT 2.75 class since 2004, to bring together physicians from CIMIT consortium hospitals and MIT engineering students to develop new medical device prototypes.  Physicians present their particular challenges and student teams work with them during the course of a semester to develop solutions. Over the past few years, this class has become a highly effective mechanism for generating new research ideas and collaborations with patents filed and many of the projects receiving subsequent funding and accelerating from prototypes to products.

Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic Program
CIMIT sponsors an undergraduate team in Harvey Mudd College Engineering Clinic program to complete a conceptual design project related to the management of combat trauma. Recent projects include novel implementation of triage algorithms, water purification, a portable cooling systems for reducing metabolic load at injury sites, and a self-optimizing, closed-loop, medical ventilator.

Engineering Photonics Devices at BU Photonics Center
EK720 Biophotonics System Design and Prototyping is a course collaboration between BU School of Engineering and CIMIT.  Accessed through BU Photonics Laboratory, this course offers clinicians a unique resource for developing advanced photonic device prototypes to improve patient care.  Biophotonic device have broad application for both commercial and military applications.  Photonics (the science and engineering of light) is of increasing benefit in designing innovative, clinically-based solutions to patient care.    

CIMIT is collaborating with the BU Photonics Center to offer  this graduate level course that pairs clinicians with BU photonics students in a semester-long collaboration to design a device prototype to solve a clinical problem.  Clinicians present clinical problems   to the students at the start of a  semester, and student teams (of 2 or more students) select which proposals are of greatest interest.  Projects involve the manipulation of light for sensing or detection, or using light to aid in treatment or diagnosis.

The BU Photonics Center – see http://www.bu.edu/photonics/about/index.html

Centers and Laboratories

Patient Safety and Technology Laboratory  - the Sims Laboratory at MGH
The Sims Laboratory is affiliated with DACCPM and the MGH Department of Biomedical Engineering. It has a 20-year history of entrepreneurial activity focusing on solutions to workflow and patient safety problems, and the development of operational prototypes readily adaptable to the clinical environment.

The Center for Gynepathology Research – a CIMIT/MIT collaboration
The Center for Gynepathology Research is centered in the MIT School of Engineering with the aim of bringing new frontiers of engineering to bear on understanding the basic biology, physiology, and pathophysiology of the female reproductive tract, in collaboration with biologists and clinicians.  It also includes research efforts focused on developing new technologies for diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, and fosters liaisons with industry. A particular emphasis of the center is “biological engineering’ -- fusing approaches from tissue engineering and systems biology to understand disease etiology and progression. The Center hosts seminars and workshops on topics related to gynepathologies and provide infrastructure for experimental work with primary cells and tissues from patients, thereby fostering development of new gynepathology-related projects at MIT and in the local Cambridge/Boston community.

Operating Room of the Future- a CIMIT Learning Laboratory
Operating Room of the Future is a collaboration of CIMIT and MGH. In collaboration with CIMIT supported project teams, this Operating Room of the Future enables clinician led teams the opportunity  to develop and evaluate new patient care strategies and  test new patient care technologies in a controlled setting.

Center for Medical Simulation
The Center for Medical Simulation (CMS)  is a collaborative effort with the Harvard Medical School Anesthesia Department and is located in Cambridge, near the MIT campus. Its mission is to improve patient safety through the use of simulation techniques. In addition to teaching, CMS is also a laboratory for the study of human performance and for testing interventions aimed at reducing errors and system failures in medicine and in anesthesia specifically.

 

Technology Implementation

A*STAR: Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research
A collaboration between CIMIT and A*Star designed to bring together engineers, scientists from Singapore and Boston to foster new and relevant clinical solutions and accelerate technology implementation.