I-Corps: Ultra Minimally Invasive Surgical Tools

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project impacts public health by providing small and versatile surgical instruments. These new tools, and the business models that facilitate wide deployment of them, have the potential to yield substantial public health impact. The tools will enable surgeons to perform surgery through needle-sized openings in the human body rather than large incisions. This will result in faster patient recovery and less pain. Also, less invasive surgeries should be expected to reduce hospitalization time and thus produce substantial financial savings for the national health care system. This I-Corps project will investigate the use of these new instruments in sinus surgery, eye surgery, and neurosurgery, among other clinical applications. Each of these are large potential markets for the technology.This I-Corps project is based on prior NSF-funded discovery that superelastic flexure elements can enable ultra-miniature deflectable surgical tools. The invention that forms the basis of this I-Corps project involves selective removal of material from a superelastic Nitinol tube to create an articulated instrument tip. This was motivated by the need for very small-diameter (needle-size) robot wrists. A goal of this I-Corps project is to determine whether it can be used in non-robotic hand-held surgical instruments to help surgeons access hard-to-reach locations in the human body (e.g. the sinus cavities or the ventricles in the brain). The I-Corps process will be used to determine whether customers prefer this device as a robotic system or as a non-motorized hand-held tool. It will also be used to determine which user interface is desired by surgeons in each surgical specialty, as well as which tip shapes are most valuable in each surgical procedure.