My Surgeon Left a Tool in Me – Entrepreneurial Track

"My surgeon left a tool in me" otherwise known as retained foreign object (RFO). How many times have you heard this story in the news? My goal is to develop technologies to combat this problem in which the Joint Commission considered it to be a never sentinel event. The current state requires nurses/scrub tech to count hundreds of tools which is an imperfect science and costly because it is time intensive and when the count is off, you started to question if your original count was correct. Yes, this is 2019 with powerful hand held computer such as the iPhone but in surgery to prevent a major mistake, we rely on human "counting"??? We need a better and more accurate system that does not rely so much on counting which has been shown to lead to errors. The proposed device should provide an objective account of all surgical instruments, sponges and needles and/or scanning of the patient's body to detect the presence of any RFO. If this device works full proof, this will have a huge impact and will be use on every single operation being done in the US.

Project Mentor:

Engineering Mentor: Christine King, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine, kingce@uci.edu

Physician Mentor: Ninh Nguyen, MD, Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, UC Irvine, ninhn@uci.edu

Team: