Lab News
Community Scholars Award
The Community Engaged Research Core (CERC) selected Emily McCabe as a 2023-2024 Community Scholar for her proposal entitled 'Improving Patient Education In-Clinic and At-Home: A study of knowledge gaps and technology-based education efficacy'. Emily will be mentored by Dr. Erin Gillaspie as she works to learn about the common public misconceptions regarding surgical robotics and develop educational materials. The CERC is a partnership between Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt University to improve community healthcare through research. Congratulations Emily and Dr. Gillaspie!
VISE Welcome Back Week
As we start the semester, we're excited to welcome all of the new and returning students to VISE! MEDLab helped to organize several events, including welcome back dinners, coffee talks, and 'Leveraging VISE for You' where we led training sessions for the various equipment around VISE.
$1.8M SBIR Grant to MED Lab Startup EndoTheia
MED Lab Startup EndoTheia recieved a new grant titled "Breaking the Scope Port Size Barrier: A New Kind of Endoscope that Removes Large Kidney Stones Rapidly" for $1,848,346. This grant will enable EndoTheia to create a new product that will enable kidney stones to be removed from the body much faster.
Life Sciences Showcase
Dr. Webster presented at the Life Sciences Showcase event at Vanderbilt. His remarks were on the process of inventing new devices, developing them in the lab, launching a startup and maturing them all the way to human use. He emphasized the outstanding partnerships at Vanderbilt (including clinical, engineering, technology transfer, and regulatory) which all must pull together to make this happen, and especially acknowledged finacial support from Launch Tennessee that made a recent first-in-human study possible.
Tayfun Successfully Defends
Tayfun officially became Dr. Ertop today when he successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Congratulations Dr. Ertop!
Successful First-In-Human
MED Lab Startup EndoTheia completed its first first-in-human clinical study on a new product for bile duct access. The company's product has the potential to dramatically reduce infections caused by current duodenoscopes, which are known to harbor bacteria and transfer it from one patient to the next.
Welcome Ethan
We're super excited to welcome Ethan Wilke to the lab as our newest PhD Student! He comes to us from WPI after getting his Bachelor's in Biomedical, Master's Robotics, and doing research at COMET Lab!
Keynote at MIDL
Today Dr. Webster presented a keynote lecture at the Medical Imaging and Deep Learing (MIDL) conference. He talked about the process of commercializing university discoveries including surgical robots, and getting them all the way from the lab into the hands of doctors.
MIDL Tours
We were super excited to be able to have our visitors from the MIDL conference come through and tour our lab space! Over the course of the 3 day conference, visitors were able to tour VISE and see a showcase of demos from several labs, including our own.
Hamlyn Symposium 2023
MED Lab research was prominent at this year's Hamlyn Symposium. Piper presented an outstanding paper on image-guided kidney surgery. Dr. Webster presented an overview of the Lab's work on a new robot for colon surgery that delivers two tiny manipulators through a standard colonoscope. Dr. Webster also presented 3 workshop talks: one on robot automation, another on how to choose the best medical problems and solutions for surgical robots, and a third on how to get to first-in-human use with a robotic system, and participated in a panel discussion on te future of robotic surgery.
NIH's Training Grantees Meeting 2023
Piper recently traveled to the National Institutes of Health headquarters in Bethesda, MD to share her research, meet with other T-32 Training Grantees, PI's, and Program Officers, and learn more about NIH’s funding mechanisms.
Piper's Research in Progress Presentation
Piper did an amazing job today giving her first seminar talk, titled "In Vivo Human Pilot Studies Guiding Next Generation System Design for da Vinci Image Guided Surgical System", at the VISE Research in Progress seminar series!
MEDLab Crawfish Boil
Our annual crawfish boil was a success, complete with crawfish, shrimp, sausage and vegetables! We had a great time with our MEDLab affiliates and alumni.
MEDLab at the Commencement
This year at the commencement we celebrated the graduation of three MEDLab members Dr. Max Emerson, Dr. Margaret Rox, and Dr. James Ferguson!
NSF Awards
Congratulations to graduate student Piper Cannon and undergraduate Mariana Smith for their awards from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), and to graduate student Jack Peters for his recognition as an Honorable Mention!
ISTU 2023
Daniel Esser won the Student Abstract Award for his work on steerable acoustic waveguides for targeted delivery of therapeutic ultrasound, which he will be presenting at the International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound (ISTU) in Lyon, France.
Conference Presentations at SPIE Medical Imaging 2023
Abby Grillo and Jason Shrand presented their research at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference in San Diego, California! Jack Peters also got to experience his first conference with them to learn about medical imaging.
Field Trip to VISE
Our annual 3-week STEM course that our students teach at Harpeth Hall High School culminated in a field trip to our very own VISE lab! Read more about it at: MED lab’s perennial engineering class for college-bound girls earns praise | Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering | Vanderbilt University
International Symposium for Medical Robotics
Our Undergraduate researcher Mariana will be presenting her work on diameter-changing continuum robots at the International Symposium on Medical Robotics in April 2023!
Dr. Webster Featured on Vanderbilt School of Engineering Article
Vanderbilt School of Engineering just published an article talking about Dr. Webster and his research journey.
Dr. Webster and start-up, Virtuoso, were featured in the IEEE Pulse article “Robots to Improve Surgery for All”
Dr. Webster and start-up, Virtuoso, were featured in the IEEE Pulse article “Robots to Improve Surgery for All”
Harpeth Hall Winterim 2023
Graduate students in the lab (Emily, Abby, Peter, Jesse, Jack, and Piper) led a “Winterim” course during winter break at local all-girls high school, Harpeth Hall. The course, titled ‘STAR (Structures, Technology and Robotics): A Hands-On Engineering Experience,’ taught the girls an array of material ranging from computer aided design (CAD) to building your own electric motors and robotic programming. The course even included a field trip to the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) where students toured the facility and learned about the exciting research going on there. As a final project, the girls combined all they had learned into building their very own remote-controlled robots and competed in a final tournament to test their engineering mettle! The students did a fantastic job and it was a privelege to teach such bright, young minds!
