Medical Devices

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Vanderbilt researchers have developed a breast implant device that minimizes potential contaminants during surgery by requiring no contact between the surgeon and the implant during insertion.

Vanderbilt University researchers have developed a new laryngeal mask airway (LMA) that utilizes a unique, articulated tip and is designed to navigate a patient's oropharynx more easily and safely. The device is manually actuated by the health care provider during insertion, helping the novel LMA better conform to the anatomy and form a secure airway path for use during clinical procedures.

This invention presents a robotic wrist and gripper that operate with three independent degrees of freedom (yaw, pitch and roll) for increased dexterity in minimally invasive surgical procedures. This is the smallest robotic wrist of its kind, and due to its size and unparalleled dexterity, this wrist enables complex surgical maneuvers for minimally invasive procedures in highly confined spaces. Examples of surgical areas benefiting from use of this wrist include natural orifice surgery, single port access surgery, and minimally invasive surgery. In particular, the proposed wrist allows for very high precision roll about the longitudinal axis of the gripper while overcoming problems of run-out motion typically encountered in existing wrists. Thus this wrist is particularly suitable for extreme precision maneuvers for micro-surgery in confined spaces.

Researchers have developed a non-invasive method for creating vascular occlusions at specific locations within a vessel using magnetic resonance guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS). The speed and efficacy of this approach is better than traditional vascular occlusion methods, and the method can be further enhanced through the use of phase shift nano-droplets. The approach is even applicable to large vessels that can be extremely challenging to ablate due to the heat sink effect. Ultimately, the ability to occlude selected vasculature could aid in the treatment of vascular malformations, hemorrhage control, and tumor devascularization.