WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — When Morgan Coghlan and Ronith Dasari signed up for their junior year Professionalization and Design course in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, little did they know that after two years of extensive research and testing, their design for a reimagined surgical tool would be vying for first prize in a national inventors’ competition.
Their prototype — an updated laparoscopic grasper with force sensors in its tip — will be judged in the final of the Collegiate Inventors Competition in Washington, D.C., as well as being placed in the running for the People’s Choice Award.
Members of the community can vote on their favorite people’s choice design until Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 5 p.m. A program sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the CIC invites undergraduate and graduate teams from across the country to submit innovations from any discipline to be judged on their merits as novel inventions.
“I see it as a big deal,” said Asem Aboelzahab, a lead instructional lab and senior design projects coordinator in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue. “The competition is at a national scale, and includes not just (inventions) within biomedical engineering, but inventions in general.”
Coghlan and Dasari’s grasper is similar in principle to most graspers used within laparoscopic surgeries. It remains a long, thin, toothpick-like rod with a pincered end, like “a grabber tool that an older person would use to grab something off the ground,” Dasari said.
This grasper manipulates tissues inside the body cavity through small incisions made by the surgeon specifically for the device, a key feature of laparoscopic surgeries. These procedures are typically involved in the shifting or removal of organs like the appendix, kidney and gallbladder.
The key difference? Their grasper tells the surgeon — in real time — how much force is being applied by the grasper’s tip, allowing the surgeon to make more informed decisions about tool placement and pressure during the procedure. This information helps physicians have a better picture of a patient’s overall health during surgery as well as judge recovery time more accurately.
The force information is sent through sensors placed in the tips of the grasper’s jaws and sent directly to the surgeon’s display, integrated directly into the machine’s computer system.
“Currently (the graspers) are just a mechanical system where the surgeon has a camera in that location while they’re using this grasper on other tools,” Aboelzahab said. “But one key thing is that the surgeon can’t sense. Maybe they get a sense of it with the experience of doing these procedures over and over, but they don’t really know how much force they’re applying on tissue.”
“This problem is something that is widely known among people that do this kind of surgery,” Dasari said. “When using these kinds of tools, you can’t feel or see as well as you would in an open surgery. And so, the innovative part of this project came from asking, ‘How do we fix this common issue?’”
To even discover there was need of an updated grasper required research, development and persistence.
Coghlan and Dasari, along with teammates Raishma Anwar, Maneesh Balla and Tyler Dierckman, spent the better part of a semester interviewing over a dozen different professionals in the surgery industry to identify a common problem during their junior year Professionalization and Design course.
After coming up with a viable schematic and a plan for building, the team took their grasper concept from idea to prototype in their senior year Capstone Design course in the fall 2024 semester.
“Some of the people we were interviewing here at Purdue mentioned a few issues with laparoscopy, including graspers, mainly that the lack of haptic feedback was an issue,” Coghlan said. “So, we researched it more throughout the semester, and we submitted our final overview on a possible solution for it. And then going into senior year, our team decided to carry on that idea into our senior design project, which is how our device started to develop.”
Purdue offers an optional Translational Design course for second-semester biomedical engineering seniors to continue testing their prototypes. This allows them to finalize their designs for possible publication, patent, or in the case of Coghlan and Dasari, submitting them for competitions.
While three of their teammates ended up stepping away from the project after senior capstone, Coghlan and Dasari kept working, intent on showcasing their project on the national stage.
“When we were doing (Translational Design) at the start, we had the plan that by the end of the semester to submit it to some design competitions or maybe make a paper out of it,” Coghlan said. “We didn’t get around to doing the paper, but we did get around to submitting the project at to a few different design competitions. It was our plan to finish it off.”
Coghlan, Dasari and the rest of the finalists for the Collegiate Inventors Competition will make their way to the nation’s capital for final judging on Oct. 16 from a panel of the National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, including Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the Super Soaker. They will hope to bring home the hardware of cash, patent acceleration on their grasper design and put Purdue’s name up on the national design stage.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Device by Purdue biomedical engineering students vies for 1st in national inventors competition
Reporting by Elijah Greene / Lafayette Journal & Courier
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