A Carle Illinois College of Medicine student has been selected for a prestigious fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new system to extend emergency neurosurgical care in remote and under-resourced areas. The new neurosurgical navigation system could be a lifesaver, enabling non-specialist medical personnel to stabilize critically ill patients with fluid build-up on the brain until they can be transported to advanced care centers.
CI MED MD/PhD Student Al Smith has been awarded a fellowship grant of over $240,000 that supports his work to research, test, and further develop his product prototype over the next four years. “This grant will provide significant support by allowing my research and education to be unencumbered by the cost of tuition, and through the stipend the NIH provides,” said Smith, who is developing the device as part of his doctoral work in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the U. of I. before completing the requirements for his MD degree.
“We're developing a navigation system that is intended to be used in under-resourced settings to assist emergency providers with the placement of an external ventricular drain (EVD), which would provide temporary, life-saving intracranial pressure relief, so the patient can be transported to a hospital with access to neurosurgical resources with an improved chance of survival,” Smith explained.
Fluid build-up on the brain (hydrocephalus) can occur in both children and adults, resulting from either illness or injury. When left untreated, this increased pressure within the skull can be a life-threatening condition.
The standard first-line treatment is EVD placement, a routine procedure for trained neurosurgeons. But for non-specialists such as general surgeons, proper placement into the ventricles of the brain is a delicate and tricky procedure. Smith’s system can use either CT scans or MRI images coupled with specially designed software to map out the best trajectory to guide non-specialists in using the device’s robotic arm to ensure safe, effective drain placement.
Smith is developing a user interface to make the navigation system more accessible to a broader set of medical personnel in locations without neurosurgical expertise. He is currently conducting usability testing with nurses, neurosurgery residents, general surgeons, and other medical emergency personnel. CI MED Professor Charee Thompson, a health communication expert, is assisting with that part of Smith’s work.
The navigation system has proven effective in testing on models of the skull, and now Smith plans to expand testing to body donors. Once the prototype has undergone further testing, Smith plans to seek permission to conduct clinical trials.
He has also formed a company in collaboration with Samarth Gupta, a Harvard Business School graduate student, and Dr. Anant Naik, (CI MED Class of 2023). They are building the device to be affordable to maximize its use in low-resource locations.
Editor’s notes:
Smith’s project team includes: Principal investigators Kris Hauser, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Dr. Paul Arnold, CI MED faculty member, and neurosurgeon; Health Innovation Professor Brad Sutton, an expert in medical imaging; Dr. Wael Mostafa, CI MED faculty member and cranial neurosurgeon with Carle Health; Dr. Suguna Pappu, CI MED faculty member and spine neurosurgeon; Biomedical and Translational Sciences Associate Professor Charee Thompson, an expert in communication and training; and Professor Albert Yu from the Illinois Department of Statistics.
For more information on CI MED’s MD/PhD Medical Scholars program, click here.
As part of the NIH’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (for Students at Institutions Without NIH-Funded Institutional Predoctoral Dual-Degree Training Programs), fellowship recipients propose an integrated research and clinical training plan and a dissertation research project in scientific health-related fields. For more information on the fellowship program, click here.