Rice U. engineering students aim to shed better light on surgeries
Improving lighting in the operating room could cut the duration of some surgeries by as much as 25%, according to Dr. Munish Gupta, an orthopedic spine surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis.
With that in mind, he tasked Rice University engineering students on the OR Lights team — Ellice Gao, Bryn Gerwin, Justin Guilak, Rosemary Lach, Renly Liu and Hemish Thakkar — with building a tunable lighting system that allows surgeons to better illuminate their working area without having to handle equipment or wear headlamps.
The project will be featured in the annual Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen showcase and competition, which will be held April 13 at the Ion. More than 110 teams are competing in this year’s event, which is open to the public.
“The basic gist is that we’re trying to create a system where surgeons can press buttons on a touchscreen, and it’ll point lights at a target area in the operating room,” Guilak said. “With current lighting, they have to adjust it manually, and often it’s hard to light up an exact spot at the right intensity and without shadows.”
“Our client performs spine surgery and spends an inordinate amount of time adjusting lights,” said David Trevas, a Rice mechanical engineering lecturer and team mentor.
Conventional surgical lights are mounted on overhead booms that need to be adjusted manually, which Gupta estimated can take up as much as a quarter of the time spent in surgery.
Headlamps were thought to help, but they require surgeons to keep their heads perfectly still as they work, which can cause neck strain. Headlamps can also get in the way when multiple surgeons are working together in close proximity.
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