Title:  Smart devices and systems for surgical guidance—augmenting today’s surgeon

Abstract:

Over 48 million surgical procedures are performed each year in the US. While new approaches and surgical technologies have enabled surgeons to excel in achieving functional outcomes of surgical procedures being performed the focus has shifted to improving post-surgical quality of life, decreasing the rates of recurrences, and reducing the overall cost to the healthcare system. Our lab has been developing several smart surgical devices with the aim of augmenting a surgeon’s perception to enable them to achieve these improved outcomes. Our focus has been on developing technologies that sense and image the electrical properties of tissue for surgical guidance and on developing image-guidance-based surgical navigation platforms. We will present several case studies of technologies being developed in our lab to meet clinical needs ranging from traumatic brain injury monitoring to surgical guidance during prostate cancer procedures and oral cavity and throat-based surgeries. In all these applications, we focus on the challenges currently facing surgeons and take a surgeon and patient-centered design process to develop technologies that fit within the operating space.

Bio: 

Ryan Halter, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. He holds adjunct faculty appointments in Dartmouth’s Computer Science Department and in the Department of Surgery at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine where he is also a member of the Translational Engineering in Cancer Program at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. He has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University and a Doctoral degree from Dartmouth College and held a clinically immersive Post-doctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.  While on the faculty at Dartmouth, his research has focused on developing medical technologies at the interface between surgery and engineering that aim to enable clinicians to better detect, diagnose, stage, treat, and monitor patients with a variety of pathologies. In addition to his academic research, he is the founder of RyTek Medical, Inc. an incubator medical device company focused on translating technologies developed in his lab to the clinic.