Medical Device Nets Wellesley Grad Student $30,000 Prize

A 25-year-old Wellesley Grad Student won a big prize from MIT, for a medical innovation. 

The Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize, worth $30,000, went to Nikolai Begg. According to a story on CBS Boston, he created a device which allows doctors to make cuts at a precise depth. The mechanism pulls a blade back as soon as the 'puncture access device' punctures the patient's tissue, to decrease the risk of damaging an underlying organ.

Begg told CBS, "When I was first watching these procedures, I was amazed that this gold standard procedure for all these different surgeries, is essentially a sphere being stuck through the patient’s abdomen to create that first incision."

See the full story on CBS Boston.

There are some advantages to a robotic system: while traditional bypass hurgery requres a one-foot incision to get surgeons near the heart, a robotic surgery unit could manage the procedure with a handful of centimeter-long incisions, according to HowStuffWorks. 

[Correction: A previous version of the post indicated the device was for surgical robots. This understanding has been corrected by representatives from the Lemelson-MIT Program. 4:32 p.m., March 12]