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

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used to change the physiology of the brain in order to treat certain neurological problems.  For TMS to be effective, the magnetic field applied to the brain must be precisely localized relative to the head of the patient.  Achieving this precise localization requires that the amplitude of the displacement of the patient’s head relative to the magnetic coils be minimized. 

Working with Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, a team of students from MIT built a device to minimize head movement during TMS.  Their device requires the patient to rest facedown on a table with his or her head supported by a custom-molded face restraint.  The patient bites down on a molded dental insert so that his or her skull is fixed relative to the magnetic coils.  Using this system, the students from MIT obtained a maximum displacement of 1.3 mm over a five-minute period, and they obtained an average displacement of 2.5 mm for repeated trials involving the same patient.  Future work on the project might involve replacing the dental device with a different indexing system.    

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