Surgical Needle Sensors, Harvard Medical School

In the summer of 2013, I interned in the Surgical Navigation and Robotics Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital under Harvard Medical School Professor Nobuhiko Hata. The lab focuses on the development and testing of robotic, image-guided surgical techniques in the Advanced Multimodality Image-Guided Operating Suite (AMIGO).

I was tasked with the development of an optical sensor package designed to integrate with a preexisting surgical robot the lab had developed for MRI-guided prostate cancer surgeries. The device had to measure the insertion depth of a surgical biopsy needle while being able to survive sterilization procedures and operate in the high-magnetic field environment of an MRI bore. This research was accepted as a research abstract for the 2014 SPIE Medical Imaging Conference in San Diego.