Thomas J Withrow

Recent News

09/13/2023

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!

08/28/2023

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.

08/01/2023

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.

07/19/2023

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.

07/18/2023

Tayfun officially became Dr. Ertop today when he successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Congratulations Dr. Ertop!

07/18/2023

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.

07/17/2023

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!

07/12/2023

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.

07/10/2023

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.

06/29/2023

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.

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