Euphoria was in the McCamish Pavilion Tuesday night when it was announced that a team from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering once again took home top honors in the College of Engineering’s top student competition.

Team One-Hand Wonder earned the best overall project at the Spring 2025 Capstone Expo on April 22, the 4th consecutive semester Coulter BME has won first place.

“I personally am still kind of in shock of everything that happened. I really, really did not expect this. I’m still processing,” said team member Michael Pavelchek, holding a check for $3,000, which the team can use to continue work on their winning device.

Pavelchek, Dawei Liu, John Cutrone, Rohan Ravula, and Stefano Poma made up the five-person team who tackled the challenge ear, nose and throat (ENT) and plastic surgery teams face using handheld retractors to perform complex procedures.

These retractors expose surgical sites so doctors can access muscles, organs, and tissues. Retractors must be held for hours at a time by assistants or the surgeon themselves.

While retractor arms were created to support handheld retractors, the devices are often cumbersome, can take up to two minutes to adjust, and require more than one person in the operating room to manipulate, adding to an already delicate procedure.

Their solution? A quick-adjust, one-handed surgical arm that uses ball-and-socket joints and a sliding pin to lock it in place, reducing adjustment time and making it easier to use.

“We wanted to make a rapidly adjustable one-handed surgical retractor arm, where with the flick of a wrist, you can adjust a ball in socket pin locking mechanism,” said Cutrone.

What makes the device stand out is its efficiency, especially in resource-strapped medical centers where additional staff to operate a retractor arm costs money, said Pavelchek.

The team tested the device with surgical residents and medical students at Emory who made adjustments to the device in less than 15 seconds, an 88% reduction in time from the typical two minutes.

“And it's still light enough to use with one hand,” Cutrone said.

Cutrone said one challenge to developing the prototype was fabricating the device out of metal from a design created using 3D printing and CAD software. The team credits the Montgomery Machining Mall on campus for assisting with a manufacturing plan.

Next steps for the group are to enter the device into the National Institute of Health’s NIBIB Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge. The competition seeks student teams that create innovative solutions to critical healthcare problems.

Pavelchek said the team also wants to submit their project to the USPTO competition to earn more patent funding.

“We also hope to try to start our own startup with this and bring this to market,” he said.