Rebecca Richards-Kortum has dedicated her career to engineering education and the development of medical technologies for developing nations. Along with her team at Rice University in Houston she has developed many new technologies and a high resolution microendoscope (HRME) caught my attention last week. The HRME is one of several medical devices that Richards-Kortum and her students have developed that focus on point-of-care medicine and making sure that patients and their healthcare providers can get accurate results immediately instead of going back and forth from remote locations to doctors’ offices.
A study used 147 patients from the US and China, and tried to evaluate the low cost and high resolution HRME as a replacement for traditional endoscopes. The device is placed on the patient’s skin and looks at the cells without needing any internal scoping instruments. Healthcare professionals can review the scans immediately instead of requiring a biopsy or waiting for results to come back.
HRME has a fiberoptic probe used on the patient attached to a microscope system enclosed in a small box and running on a battery. The entire device can be built for less than $3500 for use in remote clinics. The study would have eliminated sixty percent of unnecessary biopsies in the clinic.
Richards-Kortum has a large catalog of projects that have been developed over the course of her career. Last week she was announced as a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant as a part of the Class of 2016. The video on the Fellows page says that 93,000 people in 24 countries have benefitted from 215 new technologies designed by 665 Rice students. That impact is incredible and this work along with being a co-founder of Beyond Traditional Borders has made the Rice Bioengineering Department a leader among educational institutions.
(images courtesy Rice University)