Dr. Abraham Jacob Named Co-Principal Investigator on National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Research Grant To Spur Innovations in Cochlear Implant Technology.
This convergence research will develop medical instruments that sense their own shape changes during complex surgeries to provide real-time tactile feedback to surgeons. The team is using a bio-inspired approach, synthesizing data from distributed sensors to imbue flexible medical instruments such as catheters, endoscopes, and electrodes with senses of tactility and proprioception that surpass human abilities. Their initial focus is on cochlear implantation to address hearing loss.
The effort will be co-led by Dr. Jay Reddy, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Advanced Optronics; Dr. Maysam Chamanzar, Ph.D., co-founder of Advanced Optronics and the Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University; Dr. Abraham Jacob, M.D., board-certified neurotologist and cochlear implant surgeon at the Center for Neurosciences; and Dr. Wenzhen Yuan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The NSF Convergence Accelerator program focuses on supporting use-inspired and team-based multidisciplinary research to translate solutions from the lab to real-world benefit. The Advanced Optronics team will compete with 15 other teams from around the country to receive $5 million follow-on Phase-II grants to achieve clinical validation and commercialization within 3 years. Advanced Optronics was founded in 2021 to commercialize sensor technology developed by the co-founders at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. Advanced Optronics’ micro-scale sensors enable real-time AI guidance for surgeons to increase their success rates and reduce expensive complications in delicate procedures, starting with cochlear implantation.
https://advancedoptronics.com/
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2344394
Project Summary
Overview
The proposed convergence research will combine multidisciplinary expertise to enable proprioceptive thin deformable medical instruments, starting with cochlear implants (CIs), which will detect their own deformation and synthesize clinically meaningful interpretations of the data via a bio-inspired approach. The technologies developed in this proposal will relay intraoperative information to a clinician in real-time without the need for costly open surgery to provide wide-field imaging or the use of ionizing-radiation-inducing fluoroscopy. Rationale: Humans are able to navigate even in the absence of visual feedback, e.g., reaching to find a flashlight in a drawer in the dark, using senses of tactility and proprioception to yield information about an object (i.e. pressing to determine the stiffness). Furthermore, we draw biological inspiration from natural systems which greatly surpass human abilities, such as the octopus, which is able to contort its continuously deformable tentacles to perform extremely dexterous tasks, including blindly solving complex geometric puzzles by touch alone. Modern minimally invasive and soft surgical techniques employ flexible and continuously deformable catheters, endoscopes, and electrodes to navigate the tortuous windings of human anatomy. However, these devices currently lack the sensory feedback of a biological system. Based on the convergence accelerator proposal goals of creating concrete deliverables and encouraging rapid translation and societal impact, we first narrow our focus to a single application: CIs to address the outstanding problem of hearing loss (HL), a widespread problem in our aging society, which is also a leading cause of dementia and depression.
Intellectual Merit
The intellectual merits of this proposed work are multi-fold. First, this new method of improving CI surgeries is designed in a holistic way, considering the needs in the surgical field and the opportunities in engineering and design. Second, our sensors can be seamlessly integrated into CIs without adding any extra overhead, thus making the combined system interoperable with the traditional implants and techniques that surgeons have been using for years. Third, this interdisciplinary research combines innovations in microfabrication and biomedical engineering with clinical experience and surgical techniques to bring about a bio-inspired human-in-the-loop method for improving CI surgeries. The culmination of this research will be deliverables of a sensor-integrated CI electrode with accompanying machine learning models to extract clinically-relevant data. These developments may be rapidly commercialized through Advanced Optronics Inc and can be generalized to additional surgical procedures.
Broader Impacts
This proposal aims to improve the outcomes and safety of CI surgery, help relieve the burden and costs (estimated $981B) of HL to patients globally, and advance the health and welfare of the American public.The deliverable technology will provide surgeons with real-time feedback to refine their surgical techniquewith the goal of allowing patients who undergo CI surgery to preserve their residual hearing and reducethe risk of poor surgical outcomes. By preserving residual hearing, addressing barriers to adoption, andbroadening regulatory approval, the technologies developed in this proposal may increase the prevalenceof CI use and re-connect more people with their hearing. Although this proposal is currently narrowlyfocused on achieving successful development of this technology to address HL, the work will enablefollow-on applications of the technology in 2026 and beyond. The learnings from the Phase I/II work will enable the team to move into other surgical applications that will benefit similarly from micro-scale flexible sensors (e.g., catheter-based surgery, surgical robotics, and endoscopy). These follow-on procedures would then enable a positive impact for an even larger portion of the American public.