Training Program for Innovative Engineering Research in Surgery and Intervention

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TRAINING PROGRAM SUMMARY Over the past several decades, dramatic breakthroughs in biomedical science have been witnessed within laboratory research. The ability to translate those discoveries as well as to make new discoveries within human investigations has been a challenge and has been often characterized as the bottleneck of clinical research. Added to this context has been the dramatic changes to healthcare organizational environments, constraints on delivery, efficiency, and reimbursements to include major structural changes to the investment in healthcare research, both federally, and industrially. Lastly, as a result of dramatic systemic changes in healthcare funding structure, the impact on higher educational graduates’ careers, specifically doctoral graduates, has been quite profound. Within that changing dynamic landscape, we hypothesize that the fundamental bottlenecks associated with clinical translational research can be dramatically loosened with the training of engineers intimately familiar with human treatment and trained in the inception of novel technology-based platforms. We further hypothesize that continued scientific discoveries within the human environment as well as novel treatment approaches are highly dependent on these technology-based platforms. The purpose of this training program is to create a new cadre of researchers capable of creating, developing, implementing, clinically evaluating, and translating methods, devices, algorithms, and systems designed with a clear focus at one particular application of medicine, namely, to facilitate surgical/interventional processes and their outcomes. Thematically, our trainees and training program will have a central focus – innovative platform technologies for treatment and discovery. While this training program addresses pressing problems in biomedical research, namely the translation and facilitation of human investigative systems, the program also speaks to improving higher education career trajectories by providing a novel professional development atmosphere. Briefly described, the training program is a year 2, 3 program that centers on a novel dual-course clinical immersion sequence (a first course that is a context heavy experience with physicians introducing their specialty and clinical realities, and a second course that is an intensively immersive environment with students embedded within the clinical team). In both courses, students are required to engage in expository writing associated with disease and therapeutic analysis, provocative question solutions, clinical outcome analysis and reviews, and mock grant applications. This framework supports a unique educational paradigm brought to engineering education. Apart from this sequence, training continues with addition course work among areas associated with surgical/interventional guidance and delivery, interventional imaging, medical image processing and analysis, robotics and medical device design, modeling & simulation, interventional therapeutics, and new to this cycle, interventional and surgical data science. This all takes place in one of the most strategically collocated environments for engineering, surgery, and intervention in the world. This is a Training Program for Innovative Engineering Research in Surgery and Intervention.