Clinician: Frank Pigula, MD, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Associate in Cardiac Surgery and Clinical Director of the Cardiac Surgery Program, Children’s Hospital Boston; CIMIT Site Miner, Children's Hospital Boston
MIT Student Team: Davide Dal Pozzo, Martin Deterre, Damien Eggenspieler and Maxim Lobovsky
Every year, some 2000 babies are born with a defective, oversized pulmonary artery and which require constrictive banding in order to establish a good balance between systemic and pulmonary blood flows. Installing or changing the setup of the banding requires an open chest surgery and during the first 6 months of the patient’s life, physiological parameters evolve rapidly, resulting in need for frequent reoperations. Mortality for those treated patients may be as high as 10 to 20%. While many devices have been patented, none of them have been adopted due to size, adjustability, or reliability constraints with regard to implantation in newborns. This team will present the conception, design, and scale model testing of novel system for pulmonary banding of infants. This system features a hydraulic mechanical stepper actuator, which offers great advantages in both reliability and compactness. As a proof of concept, the team built a 5:1 scale working prototype that demonstrated the desired functionality of the device. Further steps involve scaling down the device to a 2:1 scale with regard to newborns so first clinical porcine trials can be started.
CIMITblog is a publication of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT)
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