(Project in course Advanced Biomedical Design I & II | Aug'19 - May'20)
Tasked with finding unmet clinical needs in the cardiology space, I collaborated with 3 fellow BME grad students at Duke, each bringing in different perspectives, to perform ethnographic research at Duke Hospital's Cardiac Cath Labs. We observed different procedures like Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI), Coronary Angiography, Pacemaker implantation, CARTO mapping, RF ablation, and Liver Tumor Embolization.
After about 150+ hours of shadowing these procedures, 30+ hours of interacting with physicians in the cardiology & radiology space, talking to technicians in the O.R., and going back-and-forth with our professors at Duke, we landed up with 20+ potential need areas.
Using powerful tools like mind maps, need clustering, prioritizing (using importance/ satisfaction scores), and screening, we narrowed down our focus to one need in the fluoroscopy space. Currently, during angiography or PCIs, physicians steer the catheters "semi-blindly" and have to rely on puffing a lot of contrast to avoid poking on the vasculature. We wanted to solve this pressing need and help them visualize the vasculature a little better and a little safer!
After hours of divergent followed by convergent brainstorming sessions, we came up with a low-, a mid-, and a high- fidelity concepts. We presented our proof-of-concepts & proof-of-principles to different stakeholders and sought their feedback to choose one and refine our solution further.
Our solution (The most exciting part but also the part I'm least at liberty to talk about) came after prototyping tirelessly. We've followed all the best practices along the way - IP search to check our freedom-to-operate, identifying key stakeholders, how we add value, a crude yet thoughtful business model, commercialization strategy, thorough risk analysis (design/ process/ user FMEA) and risk mitigation, project management (agile methodology) by weekly scrum/sprint meeting, and rigorous testing and validation.
Our biggest value addition from using our software is in terms of higher procedural efficiency, reduction in the amount of contrast used, and reduction in radiation exposure time. These tend to cater to all our stakeholders - estimated annual saving of $ 84,000 for hospitals in litigation and expenditure on contrast, dramatically easier for surgeons to function in such high-stress operations, and finally much safer for the patient.
We've successfully:
Secured a provisional patent (Dynamic Vascular Roadmap Software),
Showcased at multiple competitions (Design of Medical Device Conference'2020)
Created elevator/investor pitch.
(Project in course Biomedical Product Development | Jan'20 - May'20)
Under Construction. Stay Tuned!