Monday, November 5, 2012

Western Students Get Real Medical Engineering Experience



Three Western Technical-Commercial students qualified to compete at this years MedTech Challenge. The program, created to inspire high school students to pursue education opportunities in biomedicine and engineering, is being held at The Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto. Hosted by the Centre for Image Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention in partnership with Logics Academy and Kids Science, the six week program gives 24 students from across Ontario the opportunity to utilizes robotics and medical tools, supplementary equipment and a medically focused robotics curriculum to design and develop a creative solution to perform a benign tumor craniotomy procedure on phantom pediatric-sized skulls, gelatin-based brain models and grapes (representing tumors).




On the final day, teams will showcase their working
prototype along with a presentation that discusses design rationale, clinical workflow with their robotic tooling, procedure efficacy (in terms of precision and speed) as well as the benefits of their design, challenges they faced and future improvements they would like to make.The teams of 4 are ultimately judged by a panel of engineers and surgeons.



Good luck WanQi, Mohamed and Fernando.